A moment of joy....

It's 2am. I'm looking for something to read. None of my books are what I'm after.

"I know," I think, "I want a murder mystery / political thriller set in Vladivostok in the run-up to the Russo-Japanese war. Preferably with a bit of romance and some naval action. Does such a book exist, or am I going to have to write it myself?"

Five seconds later, and Google has the answer. It exists, and it's called The Floating Madhouse by Alexander Fullerton. Half a minute later, and I've gone to the Cambridge Library Web site, and reserved it from the library 50 yards from my house, for the princely sum of, erm, nothing at all.

I picked it up seven hours later on my way to work this morning.


OK, it's only a tiny example of what the Net can do, but it's things like that which show me how much my world has been transformed. The book I imagined, almost instantaneously, effortlessly, and free.

What to do with a movie library?

One of my great joys, while growing up, was visiting my aunt and uncle in the holidays. Ted was a serious film buff (among other things), and the room where I used to stay was packed from floor to ceiling with books and magazines about movies, which I used to read voraciously. In fact, it would be fair to say that Ted's collection of movie books was largely responsible for me doing what I do today.

From as early as I can remember, I used to plough through magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, and I knew my way through the canon of German Expressionist films before I'd seen any of them. I could tell you all about the making of Gone With The Wind or Wizard of Oz, I knew what the concept art for Fantasia and King Kong looked like, and names like von Stroheim, Eisenstein, Griffith, Pickford, Chaney, Fellini and Bergman tripped off my tongue with the fluency of a seasoned student of film. I used to read the screenplays and shooting scripts of all my favourite RKO horror films, and knew by heart the production notes of the masterworks of Welles, Hitchcock and de Mille.

This library was an absolute treasure trove of information. It was far larger and more expansive than anything my local library could offer me, and the best I was likely to see outside a film school. (In fact, I didn't seen anything to rival it until I visited the American Film Institute last year and saw what was on their shelves.)

Ted died just before Christmas, and left me his library, but sadly, I find myself wondering what to do with it. Aside from the practical issue of where to put a thousand or more books, I begin to wonder how many of those books I would ever look at now. The Web offers so much information that this enormous stack of books is no longer a collection of information you can't get anywhere else. And, what's more, the Web's easier to use. DVD extras also provide so much background material, in a more friendly form, that I'm less inclined to read a book about the making of a film than I used to be.

There's a side of me that would love to own such a library, but on the other hand, it doesn't seem nearly as useful or as interesting as it did ten or twenty years ago. Maybe it's one of those side-effects of progress, and books are, regrettably, becoming as obsolete as vinyl LPs, reel-to-reel tapes or slides.