Click on the link to read the post http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/the-manston-airport-cpo-little-council.html
News, Local history and Thanet issues from Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate see www.michaelsbookshop.com I publish over 200 books about the history of this area click here to look at them.
Saturday 6 December 2014
Friday 28 November 2014
Wednesday 26 November 2014
Sunday 23 November 2014
Saturday 22 November 2014
Thursday 20 November 2014
Wednesday 19 November 2014
Saturday 15 November 2014
A Tale of a Ramsgate Milkman, new blog post
click on the link to go read it http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk
Thursday 13 November 2014
Monday 10 November 2014
Saturday 8 November 2014
New post
click on the link for it http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/new-st-peters-broadstairs-book.html
New post
to read click on this link http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/lee-nicholls-at-york-street-gallery.html
Friday 7 November 2014
New post
to view click on this link http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/friday-ramble-from-bookshop-in-ramsgate.html
Thursday 6 November 2014
Manston decision another delay, book buying in Margate and a ramble.
To read the above post click on the link http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/manston-decision-another-delay-book.html
Tuesday 4 November 2014
Monday 3 November 2014
Manston CPO decision on the 13th November and some other stuff on the airport + Flat fails to talk about sweets an sweetshops and I ramble on about collecting Shire Publications.
To read the above post click on this link http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/manston-cpo-decision-on-13th-november.html
Sunday 2 November 2014
Ramsgate Tunnels Maps and I fight with this new blog
To read the above post click on this link http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/ramsgate-tunnels-maps-and-i-fight-with.html
Saturday 1 November 2014
An Excellent Meal at The Churchill Tavern in Ramsgate and a quick sketch
New post have now moved to http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/an-excellent-meal-at-churchill-tavern.html to read the post click on the link
Thursday 30 October 2014
A couple of sketches and a few photos of Canterbury today, the booksellers dilemma expressed through vernacular architecture, Poundland comes to Canters opposite the “noisy affair”, smoke over Manston, reflections on the moved blog, a ramble.
This blog has moved to read the above post click on this
link http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/a-couple-of-sketches-and-few-photos-of.html
Wednesday 29 October 2014
Plane Tales from the bookshop, the Manston Airport Endgame, The Throw-up or Hoosh and the blog problems.
This blog has now moved, to read the above post click on the
link http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/plane-tales-from-bookshop-manston.html
Sunday 26 October 2014
Trainspotting some thoughts on railway books in my bookshop.
If ah git thit kind ah dosh ah'd git ah git train baks fir
masel n gie one tae ma auld pa.
The top burds cannae keep away from bak loaded lads in
anoraks.
Findin ah woman n hir lookin eftir the bairns, wi mi in mi
shed, thit's the scene fir me.
Sorry about that, wrong title for a moment there, I have got
slightly diverted into reading about the early days of railways from the
perspective of railway books published around 125 years ago.
As there doesn’t seem to much newsworthy going on in Thanet
at the moment and I didn’t manage to produce a blog post yesterday, here we go.
Back in the 1960s when I first became interested in and to
some extent involved in bookselling, for the most part bookshops and most books
were aimed at that part of English society which I will loosely class as above
“working class”.
At some point or another, probably in the late 60s people in
the publishing and bookselling world realised that book ownership wasn’t really
a class based thing, the main mover in this was Paul Hamlyn, who started Hamlyn
books. Later on he bought Odhams, with the associated Sun Printers and the
associated union problems so he sold out and founded Octopus books.
I guess I think of this as the hamburger effect, Paul
originally christened Paul Bertrand Wolfgang Hamburger, revolutionised the
cookery book world by introducing something pretty much unheard of at the time
the, test kitchen. This meant that at the proofing stage, someone was sent into
the kitchen with a newly typeset cookery book and told to cook and test all the
recipes in the book.
Another thing he introduced into the publishing and
bookselling world was market research. What that meant in practice was that
instead of sitting in their offices waiting for authors to come along with
manuscripts, the editors would actively look for demand. So for instance, they
would determine that there was a demand for book priced at £1.99 on sports cars
in A4 format with 200 pages and 100 coloured pictures and then actively go out
looking for authors, publishers and printers to produce it.
Previously most of the quality non fiction books had been
priced in guineas increments of £1.05, in fact recently I found an example of
overstickering publisher madness that suggests a strong desire to return to the
past.
Now of course the nonfiction book buying fraternity – those who
have interests beyond the obvious universal sex and death interest – to the
point of having a collection of books about the subject they are interested in,
is pretty much classless.
Anyway back to the railway books, we do have a small railway
book section in my bookshop and also some older scarcer railway books, which
the more discerning enthusiast has to ask for.
Anyway one of my jobs is called collation, which means with the
more expensive books, checking that they have all their pages, hence my
diversion into railway books.
Now back in the day when I was at school, the school
libraries that I encountered mostly contained books that fall into the category
I would describe as boring, but one of the had a marvellous book about trains,
which had foldout illustrations showing the plumbing of locomotives.
I am not sure if one of the railway books I collated this
week was exactly the same as the one in the school library, certainly most of
the books it contained were very out of date, so 1880 to 1900 would be about
right, but I suddenly found myself sucked back into the very early days of
railways viewed from about this time.
Friday 24 October 2014
Supper at The Canterbury Bell, Westwood Cross, TDC’s Chief Executive Exonerated, followed by my evening of armchair carpentry from my bookshop, a ramble.
Friday evening is when the members of the fairer sex in my
family retire to Westwood Cross, I haven’t passed my basic clothes shopping
test yet, so I sit outside and sketch.
After this. Is experience the right word? Purgatory comes to
mind. We repaired to WC’s new hostelry, The Canterbury Bell, we had several
people of the junior persuasion accompanying us and this resolved into one of
our better culinary departures.
Sorry about the rather flowery language, explanation further
on.
I would say for a reasonable dining experience with children
at under a tenner a head then The Canterbury Bell is one I would recommend,
however it is very busy and if you don’t book in advance you may have to wait
for a table. So use their website http://www.marstonstaverns.co.uk/Thanet/Canterburybell
I did the inevitable quick sketch.
The council TDC that is, have accepted the report of the
DIP, sorry council speak: The complaint against the council’s Chief Executive,
Sue McGonigal has been dismissed as unfounded following an investigation by a
Designated Independent Person (DIP).
Here is the link to the report http://democracy.thanet.gov.uk/documents/s39435/The%20report%20of%20the%20Designated%20Independent%20Person%20was%20made%20public%20by%20the%20General%20Purposes%20Committee%20of.pdf
Anyone who has forgotten all this, we are looking at the
time when the council’s last solicitor went and his notes on the activities of
the chief executive leaked into the public domain.
Next to what I hope will become regular bookseller’s
rambles, or perhaps at least the ravings of a deranged shop assistant.
I have moved on from canals to carpentry and am busily
engaged in armchair carpentry, I am reading “Practical carpentry, joinery, and
cabinet-making [by P. Nicholson. by P. Nicholson, revised by T. Tredgold.” The edition
we have in stock at the moment is the 1847 one. So in case you haven’t a copy
to hand here are a few pictures from the book.
Something that occurred to me was just how primitive the tools of this period were. Unfortunately this book doesn't have pictures of the tools and the only book I have in stock that does is a little earlier. However I hope the pictures from it will give you some idea.
As you see it is written in a rather condescending
tone so probably won’t be reading this one.
Thursday 23 October 2014
Blog from the bookshop some sketches of Margate, dodgy till receipts that give you cancer and anything else I can think of to ramble about.
First off I should like to stress that I don’t use thermal
printing anywhere and certainly not in the till so you stand no risk of getting
cancer from the bookshop’s till receipts http://money.aol.co.uk/2014/10/23/can-a-till-receipt-give-you-cancer
Granted there can be dangers in buying
books, but this isn’t one of them.
I also don’t use one of those UV money checkers which I am
fairly convinced can give you cancer of the retina.
My day off today and I went to Margate to look at some books,
went to Turner Contemporary to look at the Jeremy Deller exhibition again, this
is a bit like Chinese food, you have a meal and after a fairly short time you
are hungry again.
I had a Children's Ploughmans in the gallery cafe which is a fancy cheese sandwich which costs about £5 but does give a particularly good view for sketching, although the sketches didn't come out very well so i didn't bother to colour them.
There is also a Platform Graduate exhibition (new Kent artists) here are the pictures of their artworks
.
Then a sketch from the car in Margate
It was at this point that i realised I had a problem with my felt tip pen and went to Lovelys the art shop in Northdown Road where i bought a different pen.
The one I had been using is the one in the middle, it started out like the one at the top, but the tip gets pointed making it very difficult to sketch with, I am hoping that the one at the bottom, much more expensive won't do this.
What are you reading at the moment? I am reading a book about The Great Ouse, this is a river that I once had a boat on. Well to be honest it's much more a canal, one of the most canaled river systems.
There are a few canal books on the shelf in my bookshop at the moment so I may read another.
It has a fairly large Maritime section.
I am starting to get the feel of the new felt tip I think, it's an Edding 1600 that says 01 on the end.
I also bought this
which is the business end of a watercolour brush
I am vaguely wondering if you can repair a worn out one.
Inevitably on to Manston apparently a team from RiverOak are
in Thanet http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Riveroak-partners-Kent-Thanet-council-talks/story-23396051-detail/story.html
and there is both an new page on their website about Manston and there isn’t
So here is the RiverOak website http://www.riveroakic.com/ with no plan
for Manston and here is the RiverOak new UK website with a plan for Manston http://www.riveroakinvestments.co.uk/
and even more bizarrely here is where the new plan for Manston was yesterday http://riveroakic.wpengine.com/alt-our-plan-for-manston/
Perhaps there are now two RiverOaks in the way that there
were two SFPs however what this all means is anybody’s guess.
All of the pictures of aircraft that were on their .com site
earlier in the week have gone as have all the stuff about airport on their
alternative assets page.
Wednesday 22 October 2014
A bad moment on the blog
Sorry about this but I have just inadvertently deleted the
last 100 comments, about four days worth, I ticked the wrong box on the
computer screen and selected the whole page of 100 comments instead of just the
one comment I wanted to delete.
Anyway as I have been saying recently I am very busy working
in my bookshop at the moment and frankly I really haven’t got the time to
manage the blog comments.
The comment isn’t particularly bad at the moment, it’s just
that I don’t have time to read it all carefully, so I have just set it on
registered users only, the idea here is that combined with moderation this
should mean a considerable reduction in comment.
The underlying problem at the moment is that I have been
buying more books than I usually do, I can’t chose the amount of good books
that I get the opportunity to buy, and like busses you don’t get many for ages
and then a lot turn up at the same time.
I will leave it there with a few pictures around my bookshop
which will be closed tomorrow because it is Thursday
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