Ramsgate and Margate advertising from the 1870s

I guess that one of the main problems when considering Thanet during the 1870s at the level of individual buildings is that a lot of the streets have been renumbered and some streets have changed their names since that time.

The whole business of things like using the census or the old street directories can easily fall to pieces, historians have been known to give talks about the wrong building because of this, historic walks to the wrong building where it didn't happen. 

97 High Street Margate is now McDonald's, but whether 97 Upper High Street Margate was ever the same address as 97 High Street Margate is another matter altogether.

Here at Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate where I work we have a sort of partial solution to this problem, this is comparing local directories, this is the link to the ones we have on the shelves it's a bit complicated but you can mostly work out how the different numbers for the same building work out.

On to advertising the books we put out for sale in the bookshop today

here is the link to the photos of today's books 

advertising dates back about 3,000 years according to Wikipedia  although if you count hanging something you have found on the nearest tree, then probably more like four million years. 

A wet day today and so moderately quiet in the bookshop, so we put a lot of books out, more than we would expect to sell on a busy day, so handy for catching up.

I will carry on with this ramble at the bottom of the post hopefully. 

So wet that I didn't get out today so only photos from yesterday's evening walk

here is the link

From my point of view the main reason for putting them up is to try find an anchor to show I was alive today.

This stems from working back through this blog, which is the closest I have to a diary, I use a mixture of the "Older Posts" link at the bottom of this page and the "Blog Archive" links on the right of this page. I found that it was only the posts with the links to the photos I had taken on the day that jogged my mind into remembering the day.

Much as I enjoy working in the bookshop interacting with my family and friends this can be difficult in terms of proving to yourself that you were alive say 5 or 10 years ago. I think the best is sketching something that is there in reality or from life.

Does anyone else do something where they can follow their past? say what they were doing exactly five years ago today? 

Do people think I keep the level of advertising here on this blog, arts, literature etc about right? 

An added complication is that all of the historic adverts above come from publications that I sell reprints of. If I didn't produce the reprints and sell them then I wouldn't have been able to have afforded or sourced the original guides in the first place, so you dear reader wouldn't have seen them here.