Saturday 29 November 2008

Who lived in your house in Ramsgate in 1930?

New out today, published with king permission of Kellys Directories the Ramsgate 1930 Street Directory price £5.99 I publish quite a lot of Thanet directories for various years, they are invaluable resources for local historians, people interested in the history of their house, they also make interesting walking companions.

If you know what a building used to be you look at in a different way, for instance if you look up the address of my bookshop 72 King street, you will see in 1930 it was The General Joffre public house, so you then notice the two stucco frames on the front of the building, one for the brewery sign and another for the pub sign. Perusal of one of the pre First World War directories will show you the that the pub was previously called the Prince Cobourg and changed from the German name during the war.

It can take one a very long time to progress anywhere when walking with one of these old directories.

Several people have asked me recently why I have published the whole book online when I have produced a paper copy to sell to people, doesn’t this reduce the sales of the book? Won’t people print their own out? The answers are. My primary objective is to get this material preserved for future generations, I really don’t know if it reduces the sales of the paper copies. As far as printing your own goes, assuming you want to produce something similar to the paper copies I produce, once you have sorted out the paper some card for the cover a cover illustration and pictures for inside, got the pages into the right order so page 307 is on the back of 306 you then have to consider the price of the ink, always the most expensive bit.

Click here for the book

Click here for the other Thanet directories and local books that I publish

Click here to buy the paper version of the book

Click here for our ebay shop

1 comment:

  1. People often think that publishing online reduces the sales of books - and in cases where one's interest in a book lies only in referencing a small part then it is probably true but if one wants the majority of the book's information then it is far easier to buy the book.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.