Thursday 12 April 2012

Day orf ramble Canterbury pictures, books, pie and cake


Having had a fairly pleasant day off with the afternoon in Canterbury and the morning doing nothing much in particular, I am cooking a turkey and ham pie, some cakes and writing this blog post.

I bought some books in Canterbury including an 1843 children’s book for £3 in fact two books in one binding as you can see from the pictures, which only goes to show that one can still find interesting early Victorian books and make a small profit.

I also managed a couple of sketches, one in MacDonald’s, good coffee as long as you are prepared to drink it black and happy children, and another sketch outside.

I have a sort of industrial approach to cookery two food processors and two cookers and do stuff fairly quickly.

Cakes with children in mind equal weights cooking marge, use a vegetable oil based one, Trex or stork, caster sugar, process for about 15 ses add eggs about the same volume or a bit more than the marge, process for 15 secs, about one and a half times as much in weight of self raising flour goes in start processing and add milk till it turns into a thick slurry. Dollop about half of it in paper cake cases, cook in the middle of a medium oven gas 4 to 15 to 20 mins to half hour. Add coco to the rest of the mix process for 15 secs, chuck in some chocolate chips and process for about I sec.

Well you get the idea, it doesn’t take long or cost much and if the 24 cakes last as many hours it will be a miracle. 

I will probably have a go a colouring in the pictures in a bit, here are the photos http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop412/id10.htm


Boris mayor of London has had a bit of a run in with Christian homophobia see http://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/world/2012/apr/12/anti-gay-adverts-boris-johnson I hope the link works say if it won’t.

I wish it were Christianity and not government with the moral high ground and leading the way over equality issues. 


Sorry the sketch of him is pretty awful, it goes like that with drawing, you hear sculptors saying the shape was in the stone and they just revealed it, when drawing goes well it is as though the picture was in the paper or the pencil, sound stupid I know, but this sketch wasn’t one of those. 

Here is one of the Canterbury pencil sketches it only got so far from left to right as the children wanted to move on.
 And shamelessly using a photo I took from roughly the same place, just after drawing the sketch, I have just added some watercolour.

Stupid I know but it only works for me if I at least draw it from life, drawing from photos is not really my bag, I did the Boris sketch while watching a video of him being interviewed, which for people is the next best thing, and yes I do cheat and pause it if I get stuck.  

So I get back with 100 photos and spend longer looking at a not very good pencil sketch than I do looking at all the photos.

After painting it in I rubbed out the pencil lines, not sure which version I prefer.

I may ramble on in a bit

9 comments:

  1. @12:49am - That's a really poor attempt at trying to create backlinks and improve your SEO.

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    1. Ross the spam comment to which you replied has subsequently been spammed by blogger.

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  2. And there was me thinking, Michael, that you did not buy books for a small potential profit but to hoard and keep!

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    1. Tom my knowledge of these “Bertall” which is as am sure you know the pseudonym for Charles Albert Arnoux (the French pioneer of photography and caricaturist) illustrated childrens books is limited. Ones from 1850 are fairly common in French, but this is early for the illustrator in an English book, in monetary terms, probably not particularly valuable, I would guess less than £100, I will probably keep it as a curiosity because of my interest in caricature and photography.

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    2. Sounds like a nice find. Recently found one myself in Canterbury. 'My Son' written by a Rhodesian farmer and given by the author and so signed and inscribed to Sir Roy and Lady Welensky, who you will recall was the Prime Minister of the Rhodesian Federation pre Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe days. Only paid a few pounds for it, good nick including dust cover and a nice addition to my collection on colonial Africa.

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    3. Tom as I went to the main boarding school for the disabled in the UK which served the then commonwealth many of my school friends were children of African colonials, so I have a rough understanding of the history and situation.

      Oddly enough I have a considerable amount of customers interested in this field and can never get enough stock on the subject.

      From a bibliophiles point of view I did manage to acquire a book with Cecil Rhodes bookplate in it, unusual as I am sure you know his library was destroyed by fire.

      Glad to know you managed to acquire the Herbert H. Parker, very scarce on a dust wrapper and probably worth about £100 in the right specialist catalogue.

      Obviously the inscriptions would enhance this value although not by an enormous amount I would think.

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    4. Thanks for the info on probable value, but, like you, I like to keep them. Got a first of 'The Great Betrayal' signed by IDS and, talking of Rhodes, have visited his tomb at Worlds View in the Matopos as well as stayed at his former rest house up in the Rhodes Inyanga National Park. They probably call it something different these days.

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    5. Thanks for the info on probable value, but, like you, I like to keep them. Got a first of 'The Great Betrayal' signed by IDS and, talking of Rhodes, have visited his tomb at Worlds View in the Matopos as well as stayed at his former rest house up in the Rhodes Inyanga National Park. They probably call it something different these days.

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    6. He signed quite a few but not many first editions, I have to admit with Rhodes dislike of women I have wondered if he was gay and what he would make of our present tangle.

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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.