Mystery Photos, The Art Of Bookselling, Yesterday's Answers

 Q 1 This was a purpose built building for a Thanet business, where is it, what was the name of the business and roughly when was it built?

Q 2 Which Thanet worthy lived in this house? you can add the name of the house date it was built, it was built for the Thanet worthy who lived in it, architect if you like, don't be shy at avin a go.

 Q 3 Roughly what date was this taken? The clue is the Clue

 Q 4 Where in Thanet

 Q5 Where in Thanet

Q 6 Where in Thanet

Another normal March day here at Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate where I work, I keep expecting some sort of business slowdown but sales were considerably better than the second Monday in March 2019

 I have been plugging away at the new bookcases in our art book section, nearly finished now.

Header boards and labelling mostly today.

link to the photos of the books we put out today

Just realised I have been slacking on the Broadstairs front

So a page from the 1948 Broadstairs Guide which we usually have in stock.

The answers to yesterday's questions

 Bounty was moored in Ramsgate Harbour for five years this is her leaving leaving in March 1951

Granville tower is tall so between about 1870 and 1899
Clock house clock dial black so from around 1842 to 1881
Vulcan, an iron steam paddle tug of 140 tons (142 t), also built at Blackwall and delivered to Ramsgate in 1858
Best I can do is between 1870 and 1881

Coastguard station at Pegwell the dip to the right is where the lower decking to the hotel and pubs are now.

An art lesson in perspective drawing for watercolour and pen, with some thoughts on corrections when it all goes wrong.

The pen and watercolour painting of Ramsgate from Oak Hotel that I have been painting in the mornings, for about the last week before I go to work, had some significant drawing errors.

Anyway I couldn’t quite nail where I had gone wrong, so I toddled of to York Street Gallery which is run by Mike Sampson, who is a proper professional artist who also gives people art lessons.

Mike, of course could see immediately what was wrong with the picture and as soon as he pointed it out to me, well so could I.

So here is the picture after I had had a bit of a daub yesterday morning, mostly around The Royal, top right. The bit that I think is ok is the part in the yellow box, top left. The cars going from right to left at about head height are a bit of a deliberate joke, and are mostly there to separate the two parts of the picture, so ignore them.

The red lines lead to the vanishing point, which I guess must be somewhere of screen where Port Ramsgate is, the horizontal lines on the fronts of the buildings, should be roughly at the same angles as the red lines.

The blue lines represent the posts that hold up the fence around the tables outside The Oak, I guess it's even obvious to people who don’t paint and draw, that the post nearest to the artist should appear bigger than the one further away.

My excuse is that that I got up very early and was still asleep when I drew it.

Here is the picture after about an hour outside The Oak this morning trying to sort out the worst of it.

As this is an art lesson I use a little paintbox, little paintboxes usually come with paint that isn't the colours and quality that you want, so I pick out the paint, which gives me an empty paint box.

I then fill up the pans with paint squirted from tubes, in the winter I leave it on a radiator to dry out and in the summer I leave in the sun to dry out.

Most of the tubes of colour I use are standing up in the top part of the picture, which if you click on it will get bigger and then even bigger if you click on it again then you should be able to read what colours they are.    

Alternatively you can come and look at the range of secondhand books on how to paint and draw in my bookshop in Ramsgate

Art Books

Art and Architecture books are something that it is always difficult to maintain a good stock of in a secondhand bookshop, one way or another I manage to better than most in the southeast.

Once again it is a matter of supplementing the secondhand stock that comes my way with reps samples, review copies and stock from bankruptcies.

One of the difficulties is the price differential between new and secondhand, new art books are often very expensive indeed with an average price being somewhere between £15 and about £80 whereas peoples expectations second hand are between about £3 and about £15. Very competitive pricing being set by the internet and my aim is to try and be cheaper than the internet, postage charges help with this and I generally manage to pull it off.

By far and away the best selling art books are the “how to paint and draw” books and the books on individual artists, with these nine times out of ten the customer is looking for a book on a specific artist.

The vast majority of sales in this section relate to paint on canvas art, books where the subject matter is unmade beds, piles of tins of beans, lines of bricks etc. don’t for the most part sell.

Click here to look at the art books on the shelves in the bookshop today.

Art books on the shelf and photographic problems

This is a bit of a Monday morning meander between customers so excuse me being off the plot a bit. I was going to put up pictures of fiction on the shelf but where the fiction is in the bookshop it’s too narrow to get far enough away from the books to photograph them as you can see.

Well here are the art books on the shelves in the shop, the usual mix of secondhand, reps samples, other people’s bankruptcies in fact anything I can find to have a reasonable art stock at prices that are a lot cheaper than anywhere else.

The architecture books are lurking in with the art books at the moment, architecture is a section that moves around to where there is space for it.

The shop is fairly busy at the moment, lots of Christmas shopping especially in the local history section, I was amazed on Saturday the number of people who made it through the torrential rain to buy their books. I had rather expected most people shopping to be at Westwood Cross where one can get from shop to shop pretty much under cover. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who is young single and employed and therefore has plenty of disposable income, he said. “Having spent a long time in the inevitable traffic jam last week, I had to wait for 20 mins for a parking space, I’m doing the rest of my Christmas shopping in the town or online.”

Back to the photography as you can see lots of bits in my camera again which is a pain, I will have to get one of the youth of today, with better eyesight than mine to clean it out again. Does this only happen to me I wonder I try to be careful when changing lenses is there any technique that could help to reduce the problem?