Pat Bentley art exhibition at York street Gallery in Ramsgate and a quick Monday ramble

This week’s exhibition lasts until Wednesday and I will use the pictures of the paintings to illustrate this post.

I am still working my way through the books in my secondhand bookshop on the mammoth task of ensuring that are prices are less than the online prices. At the moment I am working backwards through English history, so I guess there is a trail of bargains in my wake.

A lot of mixed views about Saturday’s air show, here is their facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/132490563573127/?fref=ts some comments about the lack of traffic management. The media are certainly slating the parking and traffic management, obviously something went seriously wrong.

I am pretty sure the organisers said they had pre sold about 30k tickets and it seems that quite a few people who had paid for tickets spent most of the show time in a traffic jam.  

Who was to blame?

Watercolour in Ellington Park and a ramble

I am trying to learn to paint nature, trees, skies and so on with watercolour at the moment. It is a very hit and miss business, mainly because I paint from life rather than photographs, I think I am getting better at the skies though I am not really sure about trees.

 This one is Ellington Park today, with the wind and balancing the equipment it really is a one brush and something that takes about 10 mins.

Looking at a photo taken from the same spot you can see the camera didn’t pick up the sky, which looked much closer to the photo of the painting that the photo of the scene. 

 The model railway club are building a new hut for trains or tea, whatever.

Oh yes and looking across the sea from Ramsgate to Deal, I think it wll be some time before I master the sea.

A ramble, no a moan about the airshow at Manston, technology and the problems for secondhand bookshops.

I had to work today which meant I missed the airshow and while Manston airport are normally perfectly happy to overfly Ramsgate, this didn’t seem to happen with any of the interesting planes they had there today.

In fact the only unusual aviation sighting was when some old chap got very nearly killed by a cyclist on Madeira Walk, which according to Kent Highways is in Margate.

KCC Highways ‏@KentHighways23h

Margate, B2054 Madeira Walk: The road is closed in both directions at the junction of Albion Place due to an RTC, Avoid the area if possible

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Anyway I got a few pictures of the helicopter that rushed him to hospital in London.

You can see it by the Custom  House.

Not much blogging due to Amazon, my main competition in the secondhand book world, the key for me is either my books are cheaper than theirs or I don’t remain in business.

The actual business of checking every book in my bookshop to make sure of this is very labour intensive. 

It is interesting to note just how astute the internet enabled shopping public are, mind you I suppose this is partly down to it being books and a large proportion of the people who actually buy themselves books being by definition, pretty sharp. 

I may ramble on   

Thanet District Council Cabinet Meeting and Ramsgate’s Royal Victoria Pavillion

The only information about tonight’s meeting seems to be some tweets from the council’s communications team.

Tweets

1.             Communications Team ‏@ThanetCouncil42m

@andyhodder See http://bit.ly/196vL1g  for more information.

 View conversation

2.             Communications Team ‏@ThanetCouncil45m

@andyhodder We want to know if there is any commercial interest to take on the lease and operation of the Pavilion building.

 View conversation

3.             Communications Team ‏@ThanetCouncil50m

Cabinet approves a Discretionary Housing Payment Policy to ensure financial support is targeted to those most in need.

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4.             Communications Team ‏@ThanetCouncil1h

Cabinet agree to commercially market the lease on the Grade II listed Royal Victorian Pavilion in Ramsgate to ensure its long term viability

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5.             Communications Team ‏@ThanetCouncil1h

Cabinet agrees to progress 4 council owned sites for sale. 21 day ward consultation to follow http://bit.ly/196vL1g 

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6.             Communications Team ‏@ThanetCouncil1h

TDC Cabinet approve new Equality Policy.

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The agenda for the meeting is here http://tdc-mg-dmz.thanet.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=151&MId=2696&Ver=4

One of the items was extending the lease to 100 years, I think the council speak translates into this is what they intend to do.   

The rumour is that Wetherspoons want to turn it into one of their pubs, the building is in a pretty dreadful state, the links below are to some pictures I too of the inside, sorry about the quality, it’s pretty dark in there as the windows were boarded up years ago.

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/pav2010/index.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/pav2010/id3.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/pav2010/id4.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/pav2010/id5.htm

As I guess you can see from the pictures the Pavillion is in a pretty dreadful state and needs considerable investment so it is likely that anyone making this investment would need security of tenure for long enough to raise the finance.

Another aspect is that the pavillion is subject to flooding by the sea during tidal surge storms, in 1953 it go a fair washing through by the sea, after the storm the local paper says that the sand has moved around it so that it appeared to be in the middle of the beach.  

On the bright side it is behind the largest accumulation of sand, which does help to dissipate the waves, on the not so bright side there is a lot less sand than there was in 1953 because the council used it for the Port Ramsgate infill.

Also on the bright side it is a steel framed building and as you can see from the pictures of the cellars the foundations go down to the chalk bedrock.

I do have reservations about the amount of bars the area can support, but frankly I can’t really think of another leisure use that would be likely to be viable. The building is listed, so it is likely to stay and the metal framework that holds the roof up doesn’t give an internal clear span big enough for a skating rink or swimming pool, uses that have been suggested.

  

Defeat into victory, a continuation of my thoughts on secondhand bookshops and the Amazon effect.

Sitting behind the till in my bookshop, the books immediately beside me are the ones on military history, fortunately most of the books on this subject sell fairly well, so one of them should help to explain the situation.

OK “Defeat Into Victory” sums the situation up as good as any, the Pan edition came out in 2009 priced £9.99, it is a military classic and has been in print in various editions since 1956, it is an average seller and will probably go on selling indefinitely.

Once upon a time in the UK we had a thing called The Net Book Agreement, this lasted from 1900 to 1997 and fixed the price of new books, causing the UK to have the cheapest books in the world and causing a flowering of literature.

This is a post for readers, so here is a party trick – can you name three famous American novelists? Difficult isn’t it although easy to name three from the UK.

One of the results of the net book agreement is that books have prices printed on them, these used to be the real prices, but now something funny has happened – and not funny ha ha – the prices don’t really mean much any more.

So whereas once we would have priced a secondhand book like this one that said £9.99 on the back at £4.99, now if the book is in nice condition we look at the thing and try to work out what a realistic new price should be and price it at half of that.

So in this case the book is priced on the shelf in my bookshop at £3.99.

Looking on Amazon the book’s RRP has now gone up to £12.99 i.e. 30% inflation in three years, but this is fine because Amazon are selling it new for £8.96 and this means our guess at what the full price should be wasn’t far off the mark.

I should stress here that I don’t want to to buy this book at the moment because I already have it in stock, you can however sell a copy in nice condition to Amazon for a £1.90 Amazon gift card.

You can buy the kindle download from Amazon for £4.49 or you can buy it in book form, secondhand from Amazon for about £7.50

You can of course look elsewhere on the internet, the cheapest I could find it was on Ebay at £2.99 including postage, however the copies there at this price were described as being in “good” condition, which in the bookselling world translates as “not very good” finding a seller with no mentions of dreadful condition in their feedback takes you back to around £7 including postage. 

A bit of a "bird in the hand" situation.

Anyway I have been re pricing the general fiction in my bookshop, working along the shelves, trying to make sure that what I have on the shelf, in terms of secondhand paperback fiction, represents better value than can be found online.

I was fairly surprised that in about half the cases, what we had on the shelf was better value than what you could get online and having now done it I am fairly confident that most of it is.

There are a lot of books listed on Amazon a 1p, yes a penny, but in practice because of the £2.80 postage allowance this doesn’t mean they are the cheapest copies on Amazon, most of the potboilers are available on Amazon, secondhand for about £1.50 including postage.     

So something to consider here when someone says to you “I only paid a penny for it” this may not have been the cheapest option.   

Another interesting thing here is that the Amazon app on my mobile phone didn’t bring up the cheapest copy available nor did the Ebay app. What got the price down was spending a considerable amount of time delving online.

This is the area where the difference between finding the price of a book you want to sell and making some sort of effort to buy the thing cheaply comes into play. A bit of advice here; if you are considering selling a book, look it up as though you were trying to buy it cheaply.   

I will ramble on here.    

Cloud over the sea from Margate watercolour

I have spent the last few hours trying to master painting the cloudy skies we are having at the moment. I think this is the best attempt so far. Dobbs of dilute Payne’s grey on wet paper where the grey bits are, followed by white gouache where the white bits are.  

Saturday Ramble, Tesco, Arlington, Ezekiel, Brutalism, Books and the Internet

Tesco in Margate first, my take here is that the fault lies with English Heritage for not making Arlington House a listed building and that any ground floor shops Tesco or other should have been done in the 1960s brutalist style of the rest of the building.

Quite simply Arlington is Margate’s most significant piece of retro and should have been treated accordingly, painting it magnolia, installing plastic widows seems to me to be unfortunate for a town that has recently acquired a significant and iconic modern art gallery. When the time comes can they be trusted not to vandalise their chipperfield.

On to Sandy Ezekiel, as you have probably noticed, not only is the taxpayer paying thousands of pounds to keep him in prison, a total waste of money when someone isn’t a danger to the community, but the public purse only gets £2000 and he gets to keep the properties.

I would have been a lot happier if he had the property confiscated, put into auction and the proceeds given to the council, which certainly needs the money.

Not much of a post here as I am still working on ensuring that the books in my bookshop are cheaper than on the internet, which in the case of most paperbacks and Amazon was less than an Amazon penny, which converts into real money as £2.81 and now means with Amazon Prime a lot less.     

I have done most of the general paperback fiction now with only a couple of bookcases left to go this link takes you pictures of some of the As and Bs just to give you an idea of the size of the task https://plus.google.com/103118335852639233427/posts?banner=pwa

It was easier this time around as already most of the books were cheaper than Amazon et al, where the prices really seem to have crashed is pulp fiction, the books with a history of literary merit seem to holding their prices well, even most of those where the copyright has expired and the e-book or Kindle download is free.

Dornier 17 in Ramsgate Harbour pictures and a day off ramble

 Not fantastic pictures but I assumed that people would want to know what you can see of the plane, both looking down from the westcliff and from the western harbour wall, these was taken using 200mm lens on a slr digital camera, so the pictures show bout what you would see using ordinary binoculars. 

 The pictures will probably enlarge if clicked on.

I did start doing a sketch, but a car parked in front of me obscuring the view, so what you get is up to that point in time.

The Cafe, not sure what it is called, is a useful find £1.10 for a cup of tea and a very good view.

you can see the waitress clearing away my tea, I may ramble on here

as you see filming disruption in the harbour from the weekend.