A few old Thanet pictures and some thoughts on selling your books.

Sunday today, so I’ve been out buying books, painting and god bothering, feeding the demand for East Kent history books here in Ramsgate is the main issue.

I should like to point out here that I usually want to buy books and booklets about East Kent, especially those published before about 1997 and especially those about The Isle of Thanet.

This raises the question I get asked in one shape or form, which is roughly: - I have some books which I would like to either turn into money or different books?

There are several options with selling books. You can take them all to the boot fair, but most of the people buying books at bootfairs will be buying them to resell, unless the books are recent popular and low value. You can sell them on the internet, but if you look at the completed listing on Ebay, you will see that most books listed on the internet don’t actually sell. There are various online sellers including Amazon who will buy you books from you, but the amount the pay is usually pretty low.

An issue here is that most of the books that are worth more than the cost of posting them are in the hands of book collectors who are regularly in secondhand bookshops and understand the situation.

Many years ago I was young and suffered from acute skintitis, this is a pecuniary disease common around places like Graduate Lane, artist and musicians are particularly susceptible due to the vast quantities of beer needed to stimulate the creative juices. I was learning to be a mechanic of sorts, so things could have been worse, the cure I applied was buying books from one shop and selling them to another. I always found it interesting that as often as not one shop with a book worth £30 would be very nice to me when selling it to me for £2 while the next shop would be quite offhand when buying it from me for £5 particularly if I wanted £10.

My take is that whether you are buying or selling books, you are a customer either way. If you want to sell me some books, either bring them to my bookshop and if I want to buy them, then I will make you and offer, or if you have a price in mind I will try to meet it or alternatively you can photograph the spines of your books, as they are on you shelves and email me the photos or share them with me.

Another good starting point would be to go to a secondhand bookshop and have a good look at what they sell and how much they sell it for, if you come to my bookshop to do this it will probably help if you talk to us about what you want to achieve.

One thing you can also do is to look at the photos of the books that I put out for sale on my bookshop blog here is the link http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/catastrophe-in-bookshop.html  to last Saturday’s and clicking on the Older Post link at the bottom of each page will show you more.