TO get to the Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club library, you walk down the hall from the ticket office, past the squash courts and back in time at least 50 years.
Books line just about every inch of wall space in this yellow-papered world, broken only by a collection of weathered bats and memorabilia on the far wall. In the middle of it, books and papers pertaining to whatever Trent Bridge historian Peter Wynne Thomas is currently researching cover a long table.
In the middle of the table sits a well-used green typewriter.
It's not there for show.
When visitors arrive in the library, Peter gets a laugh by pointing it out as "my laptop" – but when they leave, he goes back to typing out his books, reports and correspondence (there's a computer in there somewhere – other Trent Bridge staffers say they can get Peter to check his email about once a fortnight) .
Spend time in here, among more than 150 years' worth of player biographies and committee reports, and it can be disorienting to emerge blinking into a present time where Trent Bridge has Europe's largest outdoor video screen.
Now though, Peter's old-school research is getting a new media platform.
Chris Botherway, the club's new media manager, describes website www.history.trentbridge.co.uk as a labour of love. It's a slickly designed, easy-to-navigate site that the club hopes will open up Peter's years of research to a wider audience.
Peter – or "Wizz" to his co-workers – is now a prolific online writer, even though he has never personally posted anything to the internet.
"This website, whether he knows it or not, is entirely written by Wizz," Chris said.
The bulk of the website is in two sections, one for Notts player biographies and one for Notts season summaries.
The player profiles tap into work Peter's been doing for years. He's been one of the main authors of the Who's Who of Cricketers since it was first published in 1982, and any cricketer who leaves Notts, dies or comes to Peter's attention years or decades after his death, inevitably gets a written synopsis of his life and time and Trent Bridge.
There was a time not long ago when all this information was only available if you went looking for it. In 1973 Peter was a founding member of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians, an organisation that for many years was headquartered over the road from Trent Bridge. Through that organisation and others, he worked on the Who's Who as well as other books and articles that peered into every nook of cricketing history.
It was all out there – if you travelled to a specialist bookshop, became a member of a group like the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians, or tracked down somebody such as Peter.
All that changed with the rise of cricketing websites – notably Cricinfo – that in addition to up-to-the-minute coverage of cricket, also started trawling cricketing history.
Go to the website that today is called ESPNCricinfo and you'll find online details about the Victorians as well as the Indian Premier League.
But if it's Notts cricket you're after, you won't get the sort of detail you'll find at the Trent Bridge site.
"What Chris has done is, he's expanded it," Peter said. "He's got much more information on the players than anyone else."
Cricinfo offers huge biographies for the likes of Don Bradman or Viv Richards, but the lesser-known or largely forgotten to history players tend to just get a line or two.
On the Trent Bridge website, they're working to give the Bradman treatment to everyone who has ever taken guard just off Radcliffe Road.
Then there are the seasons. For those, Chris went to some of the most interesting documents Peter uses in his research – the club's annual committee reports.
"There's always funny little bits where you find out much they paid to keep a horse at the ground," Chris said, citing just one quirky example.
The committee reports weren't meant to be read as journalism or entertaining prose. They were compiled for committee members who wanted to know how the side did – and how every last half a crown was spent. Yet still, they make interesting reading as snapshots of a time when some things were very different – and yet some things were remarkably similar.
For example, cricket fans might want to take note of how that other popular pastime, wringing hands over the future of the county game, isn't a new phenomenon.
Witness the 1898 committee report, which after a description of the next year's fixtures, makes a passive-aggressive pitch for more spectators: "With such an attractive programme before them, the Committee feel no difficulty in appealing to the supporters of cricket to come forward in increased numbers and so show appreciation of what has been attained by careful and judicious fore-through and suggestions."
Twenty-over cricket may be live-streaming on the internet but in county cricket, it seems some things never change.
