News, Local history and Thanet issues from Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate see www.michaelsbookshop.com I publish over 200 books about the history of this area click here to look at them.
This book by Michael Hunt, sometime curator of Ramsgate maritime Museum, was first published in 2007. It was available in the museum before it closed. The book is about 100 A4 size pages of text and B&W pictures.
I think it is the most comprehensive work about the harbour, so if you are interested in the history of the harbour, you will probably want a copy.
The price is £9.99, if you can’t stretch to that, you may be able to persuade someone to give it to you for Christmas, my promise to send our local books out post free, wrapped up in Christmas wrapping paper, with a message from you on them, to your friends and family still holds good.
Customer feed back is suggesting that quite a lot of people coming into the shop would like books that I have in stock for Christmas.
Quite a lot of people would like local history books, either those published by me or those published by others that we have in stock and I am trying to think of ways to make this easier. Obviously people don’t want to buy a present for someone that has already got it.
I have published an up to date list of my own publications, so you can print it out and tick what you already have, click here for it after some experimentation I have found that it is easier to print out if you paste it into word first.
I don’t take conventional Book Tokens, which are the province of the full price bookshop world, I do however issue my own which can make useful presents.
Bit of a long ramble this one, technical problems mean I have to work all day today or a lot of people won’t get the local books they want for Christmas.
A sad probate clearance this week, the books of one of my better customers, his books were mostly about guns and the American Civil War, we conspired together to produce reprint of a Victorian Ramsgate gunsmiths catalogue which we both enjoyed doing.
He had quite a few of my own publications in his book collection, this is the first time I have had any back in as secondhand stock, they all seemed to be in perfect condition, but I put them in to the sale with the ones that got faded in the widow display, so there are a few bargains to be had there.
Click here for a bit more about the gun catalogue, I will put some sample pages up another day, the original image files got lost in some computer drama that I had some time ago so it isn’t a straightforward task.
There are some rather odd messages coming out of TDC relating to local blogs at the moment. A recent agenda of the TDC Standards Committee revealed that the monitoring officer says “misinformation is consuming a vast amount of officers time” and that a lot of the council’s internal workings is “finding its way onto blog sites”.
Nearly all of my comments about the council’s actions on this blog relate to major issues of public safety, like protecting our water supply, ensuring people can escape from the Pleasurama development in a tidal surge storm or that dangerous cliff collapses are avoided. TDC seems to have lost site of what their purpose is, instead of guaranteeing that the wishes of the electorate are carried out, they seem in many cases to have a secret agenda supporting unsuitable or unsafe developments against our wishes.
The council has got this completely the wrong way round, it is wasting an enormous amount of officers time by not publishing basic information on its own website, things like the contaminated land register are important documents that effect public safety and should be readily available. TDC seems particularly concerned to hide the views of the electorate, there does not seem to me to be any reason that public consultations and major planning applications should not be published on the internet in a way that the public can comment and others can view these comments.
A prime example of this is the government planning site where the public can comment on planning applications and on the site it says that these comments can be viewed by other members of the public.
When I did so recently and my comments failed to appear, I contacted the site administrator only to be told that TDC had elected to hide comments from members of the public. By applying pressure via the LGO I managed to get the council to publish the statutory consultees documents for the China Gateway development, these documents relate to protecting our drinking water supply and people flying into Manston airport and a variety of pollution issues. There really is no reason that I can see why TDC couldn’t publish consultations on blogger where we could comment and others could see our comments, this also has the added advantage of being free.
When talking to council officers I find that the main problem is a core of experienced and able officers in the middle doing the bulk of the real work, a group of inexperienced officers incapable of doing their jobs properly. This is all made worse by several senior officers trying to curtail the power of the experienced and qualified officers, while supporting those less able and more malleable.
When talking to councillors, I have become aware that the cabinet has made itself into a ruling clique, spurning the offers of help from the other councillors even when they bring expertise in specialist fields.
So yes important people within our local government are disaffected making much information available to bloggers, however I must stress that most of this information should be available on the councils own website.
Anyway aside of all of that if anyone finds that I have posted anything that is wrong on this blog please let me know. Other peoples comments here are much more difficult to control, I always delete anonymous comments that I think may be libellous or defamatory. Where the comment is not anonymous, by that I mean where I know the real identity of the blogger who has commented I take a more relaxed attitude in that I normally wait until someone asks me to remove something.
I have had a difficult week with printers which is running on into today, to produce the local books I have 4 printers, one is a big black and white hp printer and today it’s throwing a wobbly. It has a very odd fault in that it’s very difficult to get it to print the f1rst page of anything but once it gets going it’s fine, it stops and says it’s jammed when it isn’t about 10 times and then off it goes, all rather trying.
I have printed over a million A4 pages since I started producing the local books 3 years ago, have had a lot of paper jams and ink blockages one way or another but today’s fault is a new one. One of my Epson inkjet boarderless printers that I use to print the covers with has developed a mind of its own and keeps putting boarders on two sides, seemingly totally at random too.
Oh and finally this video clip appears to be of a younger Gordon Brown admitting to having done what Damian Green has just been accused of.
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.
I have been writing the introduction to The Hermit of Dumpton Cave and entered into one of those cans of worms that seems confront any local antiquary most every day.
The copy of the original book that I own, once belonged to a very well known local historian (I wont name and shame him) and has his notes inside, he says it was written by A. J. Valpy.
It is a difficult book to find out much about, it doesn’t appear in Bibliotheca Cantiana, anyway the British Library Catalogue ascribes it to Elizabeth Strutt [other married name Byron], (fl. 1805–1863), one of the nineteenth century's most prolific women of letters.
Having cross referenced this with The Dictionary of National Biography I am now certain that she is the author, however The Dictionary of National Biography calls the Hermit of Dumpton Cave Joseph Groome Peptit, his name was actually Joseph Croom Petit.
The picture of Lillian Road Cookery School that turned up today Says St Lukes Thornton road about 1922 on the back click here to enlarge it
One of the pleasant aspects of publishing local history in the way that I do, printing what I need as I go, is that I don’t have to worry that worry that the book is in any sense saleable.
The book that I am putting the final touches to at the moment is pretty much a case in point, a very scarce Ramsgate item that very few people could possibly want.
Joseph Croom Petit born at Wingham Kent in 1742 he came to Ramsgate in 1820 and lived as a hermit in a cave at the rear of Hollicondane Tavern, on land that now belongs to St Lawrence College.
I have put up a few sample pages click here to read them it’s rather like the type of sermon that one would hope to sleep through.
It is with sadness that I have to report the death of Don Long. Don was the author of several history books about Ramsgate that I publish, his help and advice on matters of local history was invaluable.
Don was also churchwarden of Holy Trinity Church Ramsgate, long serving school governor and for a long time a Ramsgate town councillor.
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.
