Children’s books on the shelf in the bookshop in Ramsgate

Our children’s book section is a lively and busy place with a fast turnover, very few of the books are over £2 with the average price around 99p, the main exception to this being children’s books which are collected by adults like Rupert and Beano annuals where if the are in really nice condition the are priced a £2.99. I will put a bit more about this right at the bottom of this page. 

 O.K. there is a whole and partly unbelievable part of children’s books, which I will try to explain here. As I guess you will know if you use our children’s book section the prices are usually less than Amazon and Ebay. We get some of the children’s books from other bookshops when they go bust and we buy or exchange books with customers, so some are new and some secondhand. We then treat them all as though they were secondhand and pencil pretty low prices in the front. 

Well quite a few children’s books are collectable and sell on the internet for more than they would sell for new.

 The books in this photograph are of collectable Rupert Annuals priced between £10 and £15, which we have in the collectors part of the shop. Book collectors have a secret sign – like a funny handshake – and so they make secret sign and we let them look at the collectable books and the antiquarian books (very old books) and any incunabula (very very old books) if we have any.

O.K. a bit from a very old book about a lightning strike in Ramsgate, (tip, back in the early 1700s they used pens made from goose feathers which broke if you tried to make a joined up S, so the wrote some of their Ss’ like Fs’ and this got carried into printing) some of the letters S look like the letter F.       

 and here is the picture of where the lightning went 

You may also note that they didn't have to spell in those days and probably went around moaning about all the young people who went around spelling things and doing other nasty modern things. You wish.