Tuesday 28 February 2017

Old Ramsgate pictures and some thoughts on bookshops and local politics.

The business of Waterstones Bookshop pretending to be an independent bookshop, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39101678 reminded me of the joke that was prevalent when the big chain booksellers opening up in town centres were closing down all the independent bookshops.

So a big Waterstones opens on one side of the small independent bookshop and then a huge Ottakars opens on the other side. So the Penguin sales rep calls on the small independent bookshop and says to the owner. “How are you surviving?” To which the owner replies. “OK now I have changed the name of the bookshop. “Oh”  says the Penguin rep, “what have you called it?”  To which the owner replies, “ENTRANCE”

I guess what interests me the most in all of this are the true motives for appearing to be an independent bookshop rather than part of a chain, pretty much have to be that they thought a perceived “independent” bookshop would take more money.

The kudos associated with independent shops is a fairly new and interesting one, I suppose “Independent” tm isn’t far down the line.  

Anyway here are the books we put out in my bookshop yesterday http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/running-wild-in-bookshop.html and here are the ones we put out today http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/jaws-in-bookshop.html I don’t imagine you would find it difficult to believe that it’s not part of a large chain. 

Here in Thanet we now seem to have a full set of dodgy elections dealings, with Labour, Conservatives and UKIP all in the frame, Labour being the last lot to get caught, see




Funny old thing democracy.


Here are the pictures  















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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.