ABSTRACT
Upon moving home during the course of writing this book, I found myself gazing at my bookcases, the newly restored contents of which – it may not astonish you to learn that a substantial majority are sportily inclined – comprised more than half the vanload. Casting my eyes wearily over the endless shelves and Eiffel-esque piles of newspapers, I asked myself a question I had resisted for nearly a decade: do you really need all this? A goodly portion, after all, duplicated information easily retrieved on the Internet in less time than it takes to pluck out a tome or a Guardian, blow off the cobwebs, check the index or flick the pages. Closer inspection, however, revealed that the vast majority of those publications focused less on two-dimensional scores and records than the three-dimensional stories behind them: histories, biographies (auto-and otherwise), memoirs and treatises; tourbooks, yearbooks and annuals; match reports, interviews and ghosted columns; quotes books, rulebooks, chronicles and encyclopaedias. On the other hand, how many times a decade would I actually relieve The Glory Game or the December 1979 issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly of dust? The conclusion, to steal shamelessly from Talking Heads, was the same as it ever was: those shelves are my security blanket. Phonelines may go awry, fuseboxes may blow, but a collection of cardboard and paper will never let you down. Should you follow my lead? Provided your significant other does not put up too much of a struggle, absolutely.
