Another Brick in the Wall, a story of Thanet Men and Books and Sheds and a general Thanet Ramble, painting, wosisname

I was only talking to Floyd the other day. “Mornin Floyd ‘ows the sex and drugs and rock and roll?” Says I.

“Not so bad with the Viagra, but I’ve swapped the drugs for time in mi shed you know and been palyin a lot of ruler recently." Says E, I mean F.

“You ‘eard about the one in Broadstairs, they say it’s a big one?” Says I.

“Yes” said Floyd, “they generally did have big ones over Bradstowe.”

I get a lot of this sort of thing now from the men of Kent and the Kentish men, my bookshop here in Ramsgate has become a bit of a centre for shed related books, or to put it another way my craft section is a big one.

Any way off to Faversham and Whitstable today where I mostly painted bricks and bought a few craft books

here they are, the picture should expand, enough to read the titles, if clicked on compulsively.

 Next a few pictures of some of the shed load of shed books on the shelves in my bookshop.

Postscriptum

On to the Ramble

Here is the watercolour painting of Ramsgate I started this Morning from outside The Oak Hotel, Clockhouse on the left Cervia on the right

Ah Just found the photo I took while painting

The blog editor has just gone bonkers and all the text is now in the middle.

Due to the nature of Clown Computing this was post was written using different types of fruit, it may make you more comfortable to know the following:- If the part you are reading makes sense, it was written on my PineApple Device, which has an ordinary keyboard. If it contains random wrong words, it was written on my RaspBerry Device, which has predictive text and a small screen that I can’t always see properly. If it makes no sense whatsoever, it written on my new BaNana Device, with which I develop the persona of a chimpanzee and hit keys randomly hoping it will produce the works of Shakespeare, or at least something coherent.     

Next up has anyone else noticed that they seem to be building another Thanet Earth next to the existing one? I would call it another greenhouse, but this is like calling Mt Everest a hill.

The rich are getting richer the poor are getting poorer but those in the middle hardest hit

In the bookshop at the moment the recession is having a strange effect on book prices, for the most part I am putting prices down, our average price for a popular secondhand paperback in very good condition was about £3 a year ago this is now £2.50.

People are selling their books to raise cash to pay essential bills and people are buying secondhand to save money, they call it supply and demand. In the second hand book world I set the price between two customers, with the lower value books the rule is I pay half in exchange vouchers or a third in cash of what it is going to be priced at. Some don’t sell some get reduced damaged stolen so I don’t realise this as a profit.

Customers are customers selling to me or buying from me, something that some secondhand dealers are apt to forget.

At the other end of the scale the scarce antiquarian books are increasing in value more than at any other time I remember, I believe this is because people are investing their money in them because of the fall in the real value of money, for example I have just re-priced a book that I priced 3 months ago at £600 up to £900.

The point here is that it’s not that the book is worth any more, just that £900 in cash 3 months ago is worth £600 now and the only reason we don’t feel this, day to day appears to be that the government are printing non existent money, nationalising banks et al.

As far as I can see if you had bought the book from me in December for £600 and put it on ebay now you would most likely be £300 better off.

A peculiar exception to this in my stock are the mid range local history collectables that I have done cheap reprints of, a year ago the little pile of books on the Goodwin Sands in the picture wouldn’t have left you much change out of £400 now this figure is not much over £200. I can only attribute this to my own reprints, which mean that the 4 star items in any Goodwin Sands collection are now available for about £35 instead of £350.

But I digress hardest hit in the middle are the books that sell new for about £30 a year ago most were priced about £15 now it’s £7 to £12.

Of course the really big question here is with interests rates as low as they are, what will happen when people cotton on to this, has covering the septic loans turned the currency septic?

Click here for pictures of the hardest hit

click on the picture above to expand

Who lived in your house in Ramsgate in 1930?

New out today, published with king permission of Kellys Directories the Ramsgate 1930 Street Directory price £5.99 I publish quite a lot of Thanet directories for various years, they are invaluable resources for local historians, people interested in the history of their house, they also make interesting walking companions.

If you know what a building used to be you look at in a different way, for instance if you look up the address of my bookshop 72 King street, you will see in 1930 it was The General Joffre public house, so you then notice the two stucco frames on the front of the building, one for the brewery sign and another for the pub sign. Perusal of one of the pre First World War directories will show you the that the pub was previously called the Prince Cobourg and changed from the German name during the war.

It can take one a very long time to progress anywhere when walking with one of these old directories.

Several people have asked me recently why I have published the whole book online when I have produced a paper copy to sell to people, doesn’t this reduce the sales of the book? Won’t people print their own out? The answers are. My primary objective is to get this material preserved for future generations, I really don’t know if it reduces the sales of the paper copies. As far as printing your own goes, assuming you want to produce something similar to the paper copies I produce, once you have sorted out the paper some card for the cover a cover illustration and pictures for inside, got the pages into the right order so page 307 is on the back of 306 you then have to consider the price of the ink, always the most expensive bit.

Click here for the book

Click here for the other Thanet directories and local books that I publish

Click here to buy the paper version of the book

Click here for our ebay shop

Railway truck bus and tram books

This is about our stock of ordinary railway books on the shelf in the shop photographed this morning. Most of these are not listed on the internet book selling sites that I use, primarily because if I listed them we wouldn’t have a good range of railway books in the shop click here to view the books

When we set up our ebay shop see http://stores.ebay.co.uk/thanet-books to sell the local books I publish there, we wanted to start with some feedback so we put some railway books for sale there, what became abundantly clear was that if we put the whole railway section in an ebay auction most of it would sell for more than it was priced at on the shelves.

The local books that I publish obviously as I manufacture them in the bookshop there is no supply problem, so I market them everywhere I can on the web mainly at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/ which is the cheapest place to buy them online.

Anyway coming back to the railway books, deliberately not selling them online and why I am putting up the photographs, mainly as it’s mostly local people who look at this blog and the mostly tend to come to the shop to buy books that they see. You have to appreciate that the customers that come in the shop, unlike internet customers, generate abut us much good stock as they take away, by using our exchange voucher scheme or selling us their books I the need some ready cash.

Funny really back in 1999 when I first made forays into internet bookselling, I rather assumed that I could just take pictures of the books on the shelves and people would browse the shop on the internet and email me for anything they were interested in.
How little I knew at the time, however now I have come full circle and this very primitive method is actually working.

Ramsgate Holiday Guide For 1934

I have just put some sample pages from this rather charming guide on the web click here to look at them. A reprint is available as one of the over 100 local books I publish.

More Confused Ramblings From the Book Trade

The Christmas shopping rush is here again which is always pleasant in the bookshop as you feel most of the shoppers are buying people something that they actually want, or the person who will receive it as a present will want, this is especially so with the local history books. This is not particularly a money thing as from the customers point of view none of the books I produce are over £10 and from my point of view the profit margin is fairly small. However in terms of giving local people a bit of extra enjoyment over Christmas it is very satisfying.

I have just published some more old pictures of the harbour to the web with some interesting ones of the area west of the west pier where Moses’s shipyard was, I am hoping to get time soon to produce a book of pictures of the harbour, at the moment most of my time being spent either manufacturing enough copies of the books to keep up with the seasonal demand or helping people to work out which will be the best books for their friends and family.
Something that is also interesting this year is that I am finding many people are coming to the conclusion that a secondhand book makes an environmentally friendly Christmas present.

Book buying rambles with camera

If you stand on the cliff at Ramsgate and look to your right the furthest bit of coastline you can see is the town of Deal, on a clear day you can see Deal pier. I have a great affinity for our Deal neighbours having published several books about the Deal boatmen. Anyway I went to Deal yesterday and took a few pictures of Deal click here to see them the visit culminated in a visit to the Golden Hind bookshop click here to view their website their stock is entirely antiquarian and Kent topography. I bought a copy of The History of Deal by Stephen Pritchard 1864 with the intention of reprinting it when I get some contemporary pictures, any help with this would be appreciated.

Reflections on the secondhand book trade publications

Looking at the secondhand book trade publications today I noticed a couple if things of a more general interest.

The first is that “Wiltshire County Council has been disposing of good books to a landfill site. It was disclosed this morning in a local newspaper that Wiltshire County Council has sent some 300 children's books to the waste tip - and some are in near perfect condition. Local tax payers may well ask questions, as is their right, but this action will doubtless anger most members of the secondhand book trade who were not asked to bid - including those `charity shops' who would have loved to get their hands on such stock for next to nothing”.

Ed. It would be interesting to know what Kent County Council do with excess stock.

The second “the massive firestorms (all 16 of them) that are raging across the western states tonight, it will difficult to grasp the colossal impact and losses both to property and residents. Our sympathies to all those affected.

There was bound to be massive losses if only because of the sheer size of the affected areas. One of the first to be reported, is a unique collection in Malibu of Elvis Presley memorabilia. The owner only had time to grab one major item before she fled - his army uniform. Lilly Lawrence told the American press that 32 original movie scripts with Presley's personal annotated notes and original song sheets had been lost.
It is sad that this will not be the only loss of unique archives, books, ephemera and memorabilia.”
Finally Christie's in London recorded today a world record price for J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: an exceptionally rare first edition that realised £19,700.