Thursday 20 October 2016

Abseiling Canterbury Cathedral and a bit of watercolour painting some books and a map from Folkestone, even some coloured postcards of Ramsgate.

The other day I bought a copy of the 1863 travel guide for the SOUTH-EASTERN and the NORTH AND MID-KENT railways from which I hope to produce an affordable reprint of this important local book.

The one I bought was a reasonably good copy but lacked one of the maps so off to Marrin’s in Folkestone to buy a scruffy donor copy with map and oddly enough a circus book. 

I also bought a few books in the Oxfam bookshop there, then on to Canterbury which yielded up some Philip K Dicks and a bit more stock for my bookshop.

It would be a mistake to assume secondhand bookselling and local history publishing is profitable, but it is something that we all enjoy here at my bookshop in Ramsgate.

Patrick Marrin’s bookshop in Folkestone is very different to mine as most of the emphasis is on collectable and antiquarian books, whereas my bookshop is mainly directed towards the fiction reader or the person who has an interest in something to the point where they have a collection of books about it.

In this instance it isn’t so much about which is the better bookshop but what the customer is looking for, for example if you collect books about Thanet, a local history book published a hundred years ago would more likely be in Marrin’s for £100 in the original edition but in my shop as a cheap reprint for under a tenner.

Sometimes it’s the other way round of course, but then this is only an example.


In Canterbury there was what was probably some Masonic activity, you can see the two people abseiling down the tower and I would guess that since the cathedral was built, master masons have been pulled up and down it on ropes to check which bits need mending.


They were too quick for my painting and had gone by the time I sketched in the tower.



Finally some more coloured postcards of Ramsgate.





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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.