Print or electronic for research? When a period, place, event, or individual is crucial to my story, and I want to immerse myself in accurate historical research and accounts contemporary to the time, I prefer print. I can bookmark passages that are particularly relevant, and have several books on my desk so that I can cross-reference between them to check particular details as I write.

When I want a quick fact, I love the internet. Yesterday, I wanted to get my protagonists from Birmingham to London by mail coach. They were in a hurry. They had the money. I needed to know

• the time of year (fixed by the event they were attending, the assizes)
• the state of the light
• the time the coach departed Coventry
• when and where the coach completed its run in London.

The internet, with a bit of hunting around, mainly in old digitised memoirs and books by early twentieth century coaching enthusiasts, told me.

• The assizes weren’t held in Birmingham for another thirty years. I had to move the action to Coventry. The Coventry assizes were in March.
• Time and place calculators abound. I found out the sun and moon times really easily.
• The mail coach I decided to use left from Chester. That service did the 188 mile distance in a single 24 hour run, leaving Chester at 8am and the Golden Horn in London at the same time.

For a daily service in each direction the operators needed:

• 4 stage-coaches, (at any one time, one coach was travelling south, another travelling north, and a spare coach was kept at each end of the route to allow for maintenance, breakdowns, etc.)
• 188 horses, (a team of four every eight miles, horses rested every other day, a simple equation that works out at one horse per mile of route.)
• 8 coachmen (drivers, 50 miles each per day)
• 4 guards (each did 24 hours on-duty then 24 hours off)
• Payment of stage-coach tax (a sum per mile)
• Payment of road tolls (substantial sums)

A full load was 5 passengers on a mail coach, 4 or 6 on a post-coach, and 16 on an ordinary stage-coach. [The Stagecoach Industry: http://www.carlscam.com/coachindustry.htm]

These days, we’re becoming very aware of the negatives of the internet. It can be a time waster and an emotions vampire. Misinformation abounds, and research requires disciplined checking of credibility. But for purposes like mine, it is wonderful. And okay. Maybe nobody who reads the resultant book will know or care that the Coventry Assizes is in the correct month, or that I moved my Coventry action forward two hours to give my protagonists time to catch the coach. But detail matters to me. So there you go.

Oh. And now I want to write a character who is a mailcoach driver or a guard with a family at each end of his run.

(By the way, I do want to write about the Assizes. Some other time.)