Art and Architecture books are something that it is always difficult to maintain a good stock of in a secondhand bookshop, one way or another I manage to better than most in the southeast.Once again it is a matter of supplementing the secondhand stock that comes my way with reps samples, review copies and stock from bankruptcies.
One of the difficulties is the price differential between new and secondhand, new art books are often very expensive indeed with an average price being somewhere between £15 and about £80 whereas peoples expectations second hand are between about £3 and about £15. Very competitive pricing being set by the internet and my aim is to try and be cheaper than the internet, postage charges help with this and I generally manage to pull it off.
By far and away the best selling art books are the “how to paint and draw” books and the books on individual artists, with these nine times out of ten the customer is looking for a book on a specific artist.
The vast majority of sales in this section relate to paint on canvas art, books where the subject matter is unmade beds, piles of tins of beans, lines of bricks etc. don’t for the most part sell.
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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.