Good to be back at work this morning where a couple are selecting a mountain of 5p and 10p books for an air b and b while I am trying to explain the difficulties of using Ramsgate street directories the right way to a customer who thought they had researched their house online, but had actually researched a house further down the road that had their house number before 1939.
While the advantages of filling the bookcase in an air B and B with books costing 5 and 10p doesn't need much explaining, the mistake of researching someone else's house may.
Numbering houses in the UK started around 1700 and during the last 300 years or so a lot of houses have been built, so as streets get more houses in them, they periodically get renumbered, while at the same time some streets don't change at all.
Even No.10 started out as 5 Downing Street though, so you have to be very careful.
With the Thanet towns, Ramsgate Margate and Broadstairs I think the only real solution is the cheap reprints of the street directories that we publish, and the best solution is to come into Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate sit in front of the local book section and work back through the directories to check if the street your house is in was renumbered.
Link to the bookshop's Thanet Directories
use the links down the left side of that page there to navigate between directories.
The Thanet libraries have original directories, but given their high values and frail nature they are unlikely to let you look at enough at the same time to work out the renumbering situation.
Digital versions of directories mostly rely on OCR and as one important factor for lining up where the numbers should be are two little marks donating where the street turnings are which the OCR tries to turn into letters or numbers, this can make something that is difficult enough; worse.
Just finishing the blog after working away in the bookshop all day, a pleasant moderately busy day, I think we managed to put out more books than we sold
Link to the photos of the books we put out
quite a lot of good magazines that look up fairly well on Ebay went in the sale window today at 5p each, because we don't sell most magazines and dont have the time to put them online, so they may be worth looking at if you come past.
Sunday's answers
Next a bit of Ramsgate in March 2007
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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.