Thursday 4 February 2016

The booksellers lot, some thoughts about books and art.

I went to the town of Deal today, too much book buying for anything other than a quick sketch over my lunch.



A couple of very different art related books, the Donald McGill book Wish you Were Here about the art of the saucy postcard artist




And the travel book by Chaing Yee with the marvellous Chinese sketches of London.


I haven’t had much time to paint and draw in the last couple of weeks and as I have said before this isn’t like riding a bicycle, where one you can do it – you can do it, with sketching any skill soon starts to drain away without constant practice.


Anyway authors are I think fair game so some sketches from http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/     

The tenner is for scale and as you see most things eventually improved although not the noses 
and this wonderful title particularly amuses me as at 15 I had a very serious Indian dormitory captain who read us excerpts from Dale Carnegie  


Our recent books going out on the shelves in the bookshop here in Ramsgate as ever at http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/  

2 comments:

  1. Possibly a silly question that you'll not want to answer, Michael, but can you really make enough money from buying books from other bookshops around Kent which you then sell in Ramsgate to pay for all these lunches? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding where you are getting the books from..

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  2. Joe, not a silly question but not an easy answer either. I don’t think many bookshops make much in the way of profit, the Waterstones chain, for instance, has been effectively subsidised by Alexander Mamut although I think the ultimate objective there may be to make a profit.

    I have spent about forty years of my life as a bookseller, my family had a chain of bookshops in Hertfordshire in the days before out of town shopping, big chain retailers, the internet, Kindle and the end of the net book agreement and at times bookselling has been fairly profitable.

    Now I expect you will agree there isn’t much left in terms of useful bookshops, by useful I mean a bookshop where you can have a productive browse and the buy a book or some books at a competitive price. I don’t think going to Waterstones, browsing the books, opening the Amazon app on your phone, pointing the camera at the barcode and pressing the buy it now button, really ticks the boxes.

    Anyway all that said my primary objective within the constraints of the world we live in now, is to get as close as I can to having a bookshop that fulfils the useful bit, profit is a secondary objective, which I often don’t achieve.

    ReplyDelete

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.