Friday 6 March 2009

Where’s your unexplained?

One is often asked somewhat unusual questions, like the one above, in the book business, and answering something like “modesty forbids” doesn’t necessarily go down well with the person who asked it.

This post is about my “mind body and spirit” section in the bookshop, which always has been a lively section here in Ramsgate.

Over the years I have sold a great many books about this subject, no one has ever brought one back and complained that it didn’t work and yet no one has ever arrived by broomstick, which I find odd.

I can tell you definitely that the best selling book in this section is the bible, and I occasionally get complaints from Christians that we stock books on fortune telling and so on.

I must admit if I ever came to censoring which books I stocked it would be very difficult to know where to draw the line, the only thing I try to avoid is pornography.

I say try to avoid as one can never be aware of the content of every page of every book, with a stock of around 30,000 titles.

All booksellers are vulnerable to prosecution because of this, and once again it is difficult to know where to draw the line, we are very lucky that we had the Chatterley trial in the UK.

In the UK one can escape prosecution if one can show that the book in question has literary merit.

For those of you unfamiliar with the trial, the high point was when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read” this was in the swinging 60s.

Well of course now days a bookshop that didn’t stock Lady Chatterley’s Lover on obscenity grounds, would be a pretty strange place.

Anyway click here to view my unexplained et al

And click on the picture above if you wish to enlarge it.

6 comments:

  1. A good write up Michael

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  2. Thanks anon I was in full flow when unfortunately I had a call of supernature and alas no more, when it come it comes from somewhere but suspect not really me, I am as surprised as anyone.

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  3. Well done Michael I am a Chrisian and it suprises me the bible is such a good seller cos its not exactly lite reading I had a mate who was into supernatural hocum pocum stuff when he was smoking medicinal tobacco he used to have visions now he is a manic depresive with mood swings from very depressed to veryvery depressed

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  4. Don as an ex Anglican contemplative can I quote the psalms at you on presumably wacky backy

    One deep calleth another, because of the noise of the water-pipes

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  5. Not so sure here either

    He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth;

    Carpet really what are you on?

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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.