The Queen Mother at Ramsgate and some thoughts about our local history books.

 I guess the Queen Mother was one of the last of the Edwardian ladies. As a child I was disabled and spent a lot of time unable to go to school, in between hospitals and convalescent homes I spent a lot of time with Victorian and Edwardian ladies, there is a sense where it is rather sad that they are all now dead.

 Born in 1900 she would have been 80 in this photo.

 Or 9 when this postcard was posted

 On to a new book about Ramsgate and how it epitomises the problem faced by real shops in UK high streets. Before I talk about this let me say it is a very good and interesting read which I strongly recommend.

 At the moment We haven't got it in stock here at Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate where I work.

The problem is that it has a "recommended retail price of £14.99" although I think it is a reasonable price and I could buy it at a trade price of around £8 to £10 from the publisher, perhaps if I bought a lot of copies I could get the trade price down to £7.50.

At the moment it is for sale new on Ebay at £9.70 including postage here is the link my own take here is that as it has recently come out it will probably get even cheaper.

I also think that on the whole most of my customers in the bookshop would like me to stay in business, expect me to pay the people who work in the bookshop a reasonable wage and all that sort of thing.

While I do my best to stock local books and this is an important one, we don't have customers who will buy books for more than they can buy the same book on the internet.

We have just passed the end of the month and while a lot of retailers are having issues with reduced sales, our August sales for 2019 are about 10% up on our August sales for 2018. This is something I put mostly down to our prices being less than the prices you could buy the same book, in the same condition for online.

The majority of the books in our bookshop are either the new local history books we publish, secondhand books or new books sourced mostly form booksellers in some sort of financial trouble. In these cases it is reasonably easy to buy at a price where we can sell books cheaper than they can be bought on the internet.

What makes this fairly easy is that we can see the prices that books sell for online but the online booksellers can't see our prices. What makes this fairly difficult is that the cheapest selling prices of most books have been going down for about the last 20 years, so periodically we have to check the prices of most of the books in the bookshop. The main exception to this are the tree bookcases in the bookshop where all of the books are 10p or 5p.

The book we published this week is the reprint of "A Short Account of the Isle of Thanet" which was previously published here in Ramsgate in 1817 here is the link to the buy it now button  although I recommend the try before you buy method of coming into the bookshop and give it a good browse before you decide.

There was a reasonable amount of secondhand Kentish history books put out here in the bookshop yesterday.

link to the photos of all the books we put out yesterday