Poetry, retail and the recession

Since Christmas I have noticed increased poetry sales in the bookshop and wonder if this is anything to do with the recession and all the gloomy news of job cuts.

Poetry is not a large section in the shop and frankly it doesn’t need to be as sales are for the most part anthologies of poetry written by the traditional well-known poets, modern poetry that one needs special training to understand like visual art’s equivalent, hardly sells at all.

Despite the general level of retail gloom sales in the bookshop are keeping up fairly well and I think there are a number of factors contributing to this.

The first being that with the museum closures and all three branches of Albion bookshops closing (although not the secondhand one in the old chapel in Broadstairs) I have lost pretty much all of my outlets for the local books I publish, meaning that those people in Thanet that want them have to come here or buy them from us online.

The second being that the majority of our stock in modern high quality stock that competes with the new full price bookshops more than other secondhand bookshops, as two on these have closed in the Thanet towns we are seeing increased sales.

The third being that people are being much more careful with their money so are coming to us first in the hope that they will find the book they want secondhand.

The fourth being the large numbers of bankruptcies at the moment means we have more than the usual amount of new books at secondhand prices.

Sorry the pictures of the poetry books didn’t come out very well click here to look at them.

A further bright note is that several of the empty shops in Ramsgate now have “let” signs on them and I notice a cycle shop is opening over the road from us here in King Street.