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/
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..
ReplyDeleteJoe, 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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.