Tuesday, 23 October 2018

Little bit of Ramsgate history, a few bookshop ramblings





Captain Charles West’s Funeral took place on Saturday 20th march 1915 he died on Wednesday 17th March 1915 aged 64, he was our much respected chief fire officer. Ramsgate firemen acted as pallbearers, fire crews from all over the county sent representatives.

If you click on it to expand the picture you can see the coffin cover with the union jack is being carried on a fire appliance.


School holiday this week so the bookshop was fairly busy today, strange how author's popularity goes up and down. After a long decline from the height of the feminist movement in the 1970s which in terms of reading literary fiction written by women peaked in the early 1980s, there is a steady increase again.

There is a bit of a what? In this one. The classics in terms of surviving literature from ancient history are male dominated.

During the period mostly associated with English literature, and often called the classics, broadly speaking the 1800s or nineteenth century, the big name women often pretended to be male writers, George Eliot, The Bronte Sisters. 

It's really the 20th century, but literary female writers that are increasing in sales. just lifted a list from the internet:- Margaret Drabble . Beryl Bainbridge . Angela Carter . Maggie O’Farrell . Elizabeth Jane Howard .A. S. Byatt . Penelope Lively . Sarah Waters  . Diana Souhami . Jilly Cooper . Elizabeth Bowen. Zadie Smith . Anita Desai . Sophie Dahl . Clare Boylan .. Hilary Mantel . Elizabeth Taylor . Ali Smith . Linda Grant . Jane Gardam . Julie Burchill . Marian Keyes . Nora Ephron . Sandi Toksvig . Kate Saunders   

Then realised Margaret Atwood and many others are missing, but anyway something is happening there. The bookshop produces not really a reflection, but something along the lines of the shadows in Plato's cave, an indicator of something happening in the world.

Anyway a frisson of this in the books that went out in the bookshop today, does it show in the pictures? 

here is the link

That said I find I believe the bookshop more than the media.


1 comment:

  1. super little tale~ nice photos. thank you. nice one. make a nice poster..?

    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.