One of the benefits of the internet is that it has speeded up finding and acquiring books. In the 1980s in London I always had a list of books I was looking for (written on paper -*always* in pocket and constantly changing). Morgan Philips Price - Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, 1905, The Russian Revolution by Sukhanov….(there were many more but these, for some reason, are the ones that spring immediately to mind). Eventually I got them all…but it took time and a lot of pacing the streets and repeated visits to Collets in Charing Cross Road and Grays Inn Road and a range of shops that no longer exist. But nonetheless it was always an enjoyable experience and there was always great scope for serendipity. This could be described as primitive book accumulation. 

Now, alas, the London secondhand book trade has moved from dusty shops in backstreets to the internet. There is not the same thrill of walking through the door almost sensing you’re going to find something rare and unusual, or something you’ve been looking for a long time and will finally find. 

But one huge advantage is sometimes you want or need a book and now it’s possible to type the author or title or both into the internet and from there it can be ordered - often cheaply - and delivered in a day or two. Such was the case with the recent acquisition of ‘Classification and Indexing in the Social Sciences’ by DJ Foskett. Despite the huge growth of the web, still one of the most stimulating books I’ve read on the subject.