I haven’t got very much done on the art front over the last
week or so, this is primarily because of the school holidays, trying to teach
my own children the rudiments of music and drawing has taken up most of my
spare time. And then the change in the weather, particularly the temperature of
the early mornings before my bookshop opens has pretty much snookered me.
This morning was different, warm and sunny and I got a bit
more done to the sketch I started a week ago Sunday.
The rest have been fragments sketched in-between shopping,
but nothing much finished apart from indoor ones. The schools go back in about
a week and I should have a lot more time.
There really are very few largish independent bookshops of
any type left in the UK, my definition of largish being large enough to lose
yourself in physically and mentally and my definition of an independent
bookshop being somewhere that is of most use to the people who either read a fair
bit of fiction, or have an interest in something to the point that they buy
books about it.
Useful and interesting as they are, the specialist bookshops
and those where pretty much all of the books are aimed at book collectors are
something else altogether.
My focus on my bookshop over the last few weeks has been the
children’s section, the primary objective here is and always has been, to have a
children’s section aimed at children and not adult collectors of children’s
books. The main objectives being that it contains books that children want to
read and that children can afford, having expanded the children’s section I
have been working on the décor and seem to be going in the right direction.
Anyway I have been expanding the children’s section, taking
the proportion of space allocated to children’s books well beyond the
proportion of overall book sales, interestingly the amount of children’s book
sales has increased roughly proportionately to the extra space.
If that didn’t make much sense, a simplified version goes
something like this, there isn’t much profit to be made out of an independent
bookshop, but what the hell, if you are going to have one you may as well do your
best.
The star pavement that floated away in the picture I am afraid to say is barely visible in the photo.
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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.