A sporting treasure trove - or maybe not

I will get around to it one day, probably the day before the bulldozers move in, but the problem with journalists in general and sports journalists in particular is that we are hoarders of information.
We tell ourselves that we will need that reference book one day, in the event that we need that particular piece of information; of course, we never do, but that's not the point.
Consequently, let me take you on a tour of the six workstations which make up the hub of the Post sports desk.
On my desk, to the left of the two screens I need to produce the newspaper and this blog are, from left to right and excluding the non-sports reference books: Behind the Back Page, The Adventures of a Sports Writer by Christopher Davies; the Non-League Football Directory 2008; Power, Corruption and Pies, a selection of the best writing from When Saturday Comes, as well as The Half-Decent Football Book, another volume of the best of WSC.
To the right of my screens are Non-League Football Tables 1889-2005 and its' companion Football League Tables 1888-2005; Last Man Standing, the story of hurling goalkeepers by Christy O'Connor; Formula One Racing for Dummies; Football's Greatest Characters by Geoff Tibballs; More of Baxter vs the Bookies, a collection of racing stories by Roy Granville and The Art of Bookmaking by Malcolm Boyle.
If I look further to my left, I see Outcasts (The Lands That FIFA Forgot); the last eight editions of the Rothmans Football Yearbook; biographies of Doug Ellis, Ron Atkinson and Alan Shearer and my colleague Lisa Smith's prized collection of Aston Villa reference books........and we haven't even started rummaging through drawers.
Of the books on my desk, I have read those by Messrs Granville and Boyle and I recommend both, as well as Granville's first collection of Baxter stories - but what of the others?
Apart from the fact that my wife is Irish (albeit via Dawlish Road in Selly Oak) and I once visited Croke Park in Dublin, why am I keeping a book about hurling goalkeepers?; I don't like Formula One and I will never get the time to read Tibballs' tome, even if it does contain stories about the likes of Victor Kasule, son of a Ugandan father and Scottish mother who was disciplined by three different football clubs in three months, from Albion Rovers to Shrewsbury Town.
And who ever thought of writing Outcasts, a book about international football associations who aren't members of Fifa?
The answer, of course, is the glorious irrelevance of sport; to those of us who care, it is endlessly interesting, but ultimately irrelevant - why else would you author some of the books mentioned above?
As I write, another book crashes on to my desk. King of the Peds, by P S Marshall is the history of long-distance professional race-walking in the 1870s and 1880s, something of which I had absolutely no knowledge until ten seconds ago.
It is 750 pages long, I shall never read it, I shall probably never look at it after tonight but I won't be throwing it out; at least not until we've moved to Fort Dunlop.

PS - Please do not, under any circumstances, bring this blog to the attention of Mrs Warrillow. I may want to take some of these books home at some stage and I've been trying since 1990 to persuade her that bookcases are furniture - so far, I have not succeeded.