In view of the news items about the rude bookseller op
north, I thought I ought to say something. I think in general sense secondhand
bookshops and their staff tend to be misunderstood.
Common misconceptions tend to be.
There is some desire to sell books.
There is some intention to make a profit.
The customer is in any sense right.
Joking apart the sad thing is how few bookshops of any type
now exist, in fact outside of the essentials, food and clothes shopping and
some very basic gift shopping there is very little left in terms of town centre
shopping recreation anywhere.
Back in the day, 60s 70 type of kidney the rudest bookseller
was generally thought to be Richard Wildman in Bedford. People did indeed come
for miles just to experience him being rude to them. There is something of a
tradition here which was started by a seventeenth century Venetian bookseller
who having sold an incunable changed his mind, rushed out of his shop, stabbed
the customer and retrieved the book.
What worries me in the whole business is that much of
the recent rudeness seems to have been in some sense an accident with a sense
of regret associated. I mean surely if you are going to be rude, it should be.
Deliberate.
Enjoyable.
Some sort of catharsis.
Oh well, regret, is the curse of modern times.
Allthatsaid the four of us working in the bookshop today
have been on our guard, and our customers, bless em, have been enthused by the
recent news. We all did our best but there is a shortage of incunabula these
days.
Very small watercolour sketch in the Belgian Cafe tonight about 4 inches across, I spent most of the time eating my steak. Sorry it's not much, 000 and 1 brush size,
Here are the old Thanet pictures
Here are the old Thanet pictures
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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.