Friday ramble from the bookshop in Ramsgate.

As I have been saying I am still very busy with my bookshop at the moment, this partly due to the shop being much busier than it was this time last year and therefore much busier than I expected and partly due to having to make considerable changes because of changing trends in shopping and the sale of text and pictures.

Basically the key here is to forget the medium, in my case paper books and concentrate on what is available inside them, text and pictures. So taking what I see as my competition which is mostly the internet, either providing the information directly of selling paper and e-books, all I have to do, is to better and cheaper than the competition in areas where there is strong demand.

My main focus at the moment is on expanding the area relating to the history of what ordinary people did, combined with books about how to do these things, nearest I can get is a sort combination of social history and craft.

I have just taken some pictures of the work in progress which should appear between paragraphs and should expand when clicked on.

On the news front I guess TDC plans to close Pierremont Hall and giving the town council and the folk week organisers their marching orders interested me. With TDC it is looking increasingly as though if it isn’t in the Thanet North parliamentary constituency then they don’t want to know.

This brings me on to the other news item that interested me, see it seems Laura

Sandys replacement has spotted a local vote winner, I would guess if one of his main issues is abolishing TDC he may well get elected.

http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Tory-PPC-East-Kent-authority-replace-Thanet/story-24457122-detail/story.html

On the blogging front, apologies for not being very quick allowing comments and only responding to them in the evening, the difficulty is getting the time.

Flat Eric is promoting a book on the history of screwdrivers and screws this evening.    

Manston decision another delay, book buying in Margate and a ramble.

First Manston and this is what the council leader has to say:

"I know a lot of people will be very disappointed that Manston back to back investor follow up is not in the agenda. A decision had to be made yesterday.

Following meetings between RiverOak and our 151 officer Mr Cook last Thursday I understand further information has been submitted which must be thoroughly sifted through.

This must be done properly hence the acting Chief Executives decision to remove Manston from the 13th November agenda.

This is essential so that we can ensure every effort is given to RiverOak to answer the questions we originally put to them last summer.

We will probably need an extraordinary Cabinet once all the new information is examined and the 151 officer makes his report."

I am afraid my patience is wearing a bit thin over the council’s attitude to the former Manston site and their hostility towards the new owners £1bn investment, with the aim of providing 4,000 jobs.

Anyway in the real world here is how the new owners are progressing the site http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Urban-planners-hired-regenerate-Manston-airport/story-24316991-detail/story.html here is the link to the firm that is planning the regeneration of the Manston Airport site http://www.planit-ie.com/

The picture of the concrete arrow was taken looking out of the window by the loos at Turner Contemporary, I think it’s a sort of inadvertent art exhibit.

The gallery also has an “Interesting Thing Tree” possibly something to with Adrian Mole, I didn’t measure it but it seemed quite big to me.

It was pretty cold walking from the car to the Turner today, and I though the “Pole of Cold” exhibition fitted with my frame of mind.

What the gallery lacks at the moment is a major work of art of international significance.

Here are the books I bought in Margate today, I was particularly pleased to get some jewellery books and a decent motoring book, the mistake was probably the Mentmore as they probably won’t sell but I am fascinated by large country house auctions so will enjoy looking at them and probably afterwards sell them at a loss.

A few more books for the part of the shop I am expanding at the moment which falls under the category of art and crafts, although actually includes, architecture industrial archaeology, anyway books on woodturning and marquetry along with the jewellery.   

The council have published the agenda for next weeks cabinet meeting as mentioned with respect to Manston, see http://democracy.thanet.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=151&MId=3451 one interesting document relates to closing Pier Yard car park in Ramsgate, see http://democracy.thanet.gov.uk/documents/s39562/Pier%20Yard%20Ramsgate.html?CT=2 I guess we are all aware of the two problems with cars in the vicinity of Thanet’s two main piers. Roughly the majority of traffic entering Harbour Parade in Ramsgate or Turner Contemporary vehicle entrance fails to park and comes out again 

New Local book "In Search of the Broadstairs Shipbuilding Industry" by Michael Hunt and a short ramble.

That ships of a considerable size were once built in Broadstairs is a claim that has been made in articles and guidebooks ever since the last vessels were launched in the early 19^th century, and one that continues to appear in tourist information to this day, most noticeably on the information board near the site of the town’s former shipyard.  Now, for the first time, local historian Michael Hunt has explored in detail the subject of the town’s shipbuilding past – when did it start?  How and why did it end? What ships were built, and for what owners and trades? 

     The family of White were prominent in the local industry and it was a Thomas White who, in the early 1800s, left Broadstairs to found what came to be the great shipbuilding firm of J. Samuel White & Co. Ltd; of Cowes, Isle of White.  The history of that company is well documented.  But the subject of White’s Broadstairs shipyard and its products, both before and after Thomas White’s departure, is a matter that has received only cursory attention up until now.

John White; hull lines

     In Search of the Broadstairs Shipbuilding Industry takes the form of an investigation into the yard, its personnel and the ships it produced.  Relying as much as possible on primary documentation the author acts the detective and picks his way through what little physical and literary evidence has survived whilst avoiding the descent into conjecture and supposition to which previous attempts at the subject have been prone.  

Both merchantmen and naval vessels were built in the Broadstairs yard;   but was their production merely an aspect of Thanet’s seasonal mixed economy? Or the product of a full-time viable industry?  Our detective pokes and peers into these and other questions; but whether he is successful in uncovering a coherent picture of this little known aspect of Thanet history is left to the reader to decide. 

Author Michael Hunt

     In Search of the Broadstairs Shipbuilding Industry is available price £6.99 from Michael’s Bookshop, 72 King Street, Ramsgate; Or from out website at  http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/in_search_of_the_broadstairs_shipbuilding_industry.htm (e-mail:michaelsbookshop@aol.com).  Open 9.30am – 5.30pm except Sundays & Thursdays.

Just a short bookshop ramble here as there is nothing much happening on the local news front, I did manage to get the new Ramsgate Tunnels maps printed, with five different Ramsgate historical maps in print now I thought I ought to do something about our stock of secondhand Ordnance Survey maps.

This mostly consists of a few hundred of the old and now out of print One inch series, demand for these is slowly increasing and we usually sell them for around £3 if they are in good condition.

Anyway I have now made a shop fitting to hold our stock and it will be out in the shop when I have priced them all, ‘fraid we used to rely on the, “have you got?” situation.

As the prices are printed on the maps it gives one some idea of the history of inflation.

Flat has been looking at John and Jennifer at the Circus

Nice to see a copy in an unclipped dust wrapper, this copy is a first edition 1949 7/6 equates to 37½p the average wage then being around £5 per week so a third of a days pay. The average wage now is around £500 per week, which is interesting to me as I can’t quite follow how this children’s book equates to £37.50. at the same time an ordinary Penguin paperback was 2½p or a fortieth of a days pay, so probably cheaper than it is new today.

These pictures are of books that have just been priced and are waiting to go away on the shelves, about a quarter of the ones we priced today, as it has been fairly quiet in the bookshop.

This is one of the more unusual titles that I priced today

And here something I had never heard of

Manston CPO decision on the 13th November and some other stuff on the airport + Flat fails to talk about sweets and sweetshops and I ramble on about collecting Shire Publications.

Frankly when Discovery Parks bought the Manston Airport site it was a major game changer, up to this point TDC were pursuing a cpo based on perceived public opinion as the result of a petition that hadn’t been properly validated and was signed before Discovery Parks announced that they had plans for the site, which would provide thousands of jobs for local people.

A very important factor here is that Thanet taxpayers money is being spent by Thanet council to investigate whether the council can remove a major brownfield site owner with a proven track record for producing UK jobs, in favour of a foreign company with no track record of having produced any UK jobs, of for that matter any aviation jobs. That they are doing this without any sort of public consultation seems ludicrous.

Make no mistake here I am not anti airport, when a plane flies over I am first out the door with a camera, but much more important than this is local jobs and when the council is engaged in hostile action towards a company with a good track record of investing in the UK and providing jobs, that says it intends to invest £1bn in a site it has just purchased in Thanet, with the intention of providing local jobs, then I become concerned.

A good parallel to this on a very small scale is, I think, the council buying up town centre shops in active and fully let parts of the local towns, with the intention of turning them into social housing.

Anyway here is the Isle of Thanet Gazette article about how much the council are spending on the cpo http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/pound-70k-earmarked-CPO-studies/story-23003354-detail/story.html

Part of the problem is that TDC are not really spending this money on a cpo, not even on discovering if a cpo is viable, they haven’t even really reached the point of considering whether an airport would have economically beneficial, environmentally viable, or socially beneficial. This doesn’t come until the draft local plan is published around Christmas, once they have this they can consider these things.

What they are doing is basically looking for a partner to fund them so the can chuck out the existing owners and their plans for local job, should the whim take them sometime in the future. 

Anyway as far as I can see we only have another couple of weeks of this nonsense.

This is a quote from TDC cabinet member David Green: “TDC at present are not considering the airport against economic, environmental and social criteria, that will come with the publication of the preferred options draft of the Local Plan, expected in Dec, and the subsequent consultation in the new year. They are not even considering the merits or otherwise of a CPO as that could only happen if TDC had a commercial partner willing to take all the financial risk and would depend upon the relative merits of the business case and many other factors. What we are doing is a soft market test under EU contract legislation as to whether such a partner exists. I have to tell you that at the moment none of the Councils prospective partners have forfilled the Councils requirements for such a partner. We have decided that this process must end with the Cabinet meeting on the 13th Nov. TDC Officers recommendations will be in the Cabinet papers for that meeting. It is possible that any decision we make could be called into Scrutiny Committee, who could ask Cabinet to think again. We will ensure that this process happens as rapidly as Councils procedures allow.”

Business wise I shall be pleased when the uncertainty about the airport is over, the airport itself has never done very much either way for business as there has never been enough activity there, but the uncertainty about its future has been very damaging.

On to Flat’s discussions about books, as you see he has chosen one today about sweets and sweetshops, he has gone off to look in the sweet jar and I can’t get any sort of comment from him, so will do my best.

The two Thanet sweetshops that stick in my mind are the one where Pete’s Fish Factory is now, where you could watch Ramsgate Rock being pulled and the one overlooking Margate beach that closed about seven years ago.

Anyway I suppose that one thing that all collectors of book series are on the lookout for is a series that is going to become collectable in terms of rare editions and so on, while all of the books in series are selling for pretty much one price an no one much knows what’s scarce. All the Shire books we have in stock are priced at £1.99 or less.

I think it is possible the Shire publications fall into this bracket, anyway I bought some more today, bottom left of the pile of books in the store waiting to be priced.

I have been gathering them up from around the shop with the view of putting them all together somewhere, viewed spine on our entire stock of Shire books doesn’t look very impressive and out in the various bookshop sections they pertain to, they vanish between larger books and get damaged.

Lay a few out and they look more interesting.

Anyway today I made a new bookcase in the bookshop to take them and a few other series.

The canal Shire book is a good example to explain what I am talking about, it was in the canal book section in the bookshop. To be honest our canal book section isn’t much use if you are planning a narrow boat holiday, you would need to look on the internet for that sort of information. My objective in the bookshop is to try to have books where the content either won’t be on the internet, or will only be available there more expensively than buying the book off the shelf.

Just a further point while I am on the subject of the internet, if you go to buy a secondhand book from a site like Amazon, you will find that a lot of the cheaper ones used to belong to public libraries. If you click on the picture of the books in the canal section to expand it you will see the tell tale signs of an ex-library book, top left with the accession number selotaped to the spine. 

The main thing to check if you buy an ex-library book is that it has the proper cancellation stamp on it, the Kent libraries one is the black round one, if not it is probably stolen.

The rule is something like this, a fine condition first edition of a specialist canal book about the history of an individual canal is going to cost about £10, with a reprint costing about £6. Take the fine first edition, write your name in it and it becomes worth about £6, clip the price off and it becomes worth about £7, lose the dust jacket and it becomes worth about £5, a cancelled ex-library copy with no jacket being worth about £2 to £3 and an uncancelled one being worth nothing at all.

So with the internet it is buyer beware. 

   Finally half term at the moment and my children are old enough to do their own cooking producing some unusual items in preparation.  

Ramsgate Tunnels Maps and I fight with this new blog

This first one is a reproduction of the tunnel design plan and I have some already  printed and in tubes, so it will be available to buy form my bookshop on Monday, price £5.99. It measures 3 feet across.

This next one also 3 feet across, is an overlay of the tunnels on the 1939 Ordinance Survey map, I hope to print these on Monday providing the computer lets me – it’s a very big file, so it may be available on Monday. I have had to price this one at £6.99 as it uses considerably more ink, which is the expensive part.

Both maps should also soon be available from the tunnel shop as well.

Quality wise, I have used an HP printer with HP ink and HP paper, so the maps look pretty good and I hope they will be reasonably fade resistant.

I have been working on getting this blog sorted out, I think I have done the live links (the ones where the latest local blog to post goes to the top of the list on the right hand sidebar) I am sure I have missed some so please let me know which.

I have aimed mostly at local blogs that linked to the thanetonline blog and which I hope will link to this one.

I should point out here that I haven’t closed the thanetonline blog, but I won’t be adding posts to it or allowing comments on it. The main reason I have done this relates to our bonkers district council and the main reason I have moved blog sites is to protect the local history posts on thanetonline so that the people who use them will still have access to them.

Essentially the story, such as it is, is that the council wanted me to remove a link to a local paper article and a link to the Google cache of the same article. Instead of either emailing me or phoning me up and asking me to remove the links, something that I would have done and as the council knows that over the years I have been very careful not to publish restricted council information so they probably knew this. Instead of this the council went to the considerable extpense of getting their solicitor to write to me telling me that if I didn’t remove the links I risked a fine or imprisonment.

Essentially the council using a sledgehammer to crack a nut because they have a large amount of our money to waste in this way.

Anyway the problem here is that the thanetonline blog is hosted by Google and the only action that Google takes to restrict blogs with illegal content is to remove the whole blog. Obviously it occurred to me that with our council prepared to act in this sort of way it was quite probable that at some time in the future I may publish some content they don’t like and that the council, instead of asking me to remove it, would pay their solicitor to write to Google threatening legal action and that Google would delete the whole blog.

This cloud, which has wasted a considerable amount of my time, does have a silver lining, which is starting with a new blog I will hopefully have learnt from some of the mistakes I made with the last one.

One important aspect is that this Michaels Bookshop blog was set up in 2008 and because I only used it for testing purposes I never did any of the major updates which are irreversible, so it has a much simpler format.

We then come to Flat Eric’s reviews, Flat has chosen a couple of books from the bookshop to advertise, the first being one of surrealist poetry. Flat says: this is what nonsense poetry becomes when it grows up.

The next being an 1870s book on wallpapering: Flat says it shows you how to get it really flat.

He studied this one really carefully.

Here is his favourite illustration.    

An Excellent Meal at The Churchill Tavern in Ramsgate and a quick sketch

A busy day at work in my bookshop today, why the retail book business here in Ramsgate is improving is still a mystery to me, anyway by closing time I felt I had done enough for one day so we went for a meal at The Churchill Tavern.

So a pen and watercolour sketch of the inside of the pub, some of the colours are a bit strange as there isn’t really enough light to see what you are doing.

 The food there is consistently very good.

Anyway I would like you to meet the bookshops new book promotion manager Flat Eric, Flat is now running our advertising department and I handed him some of the more unusual books that I bought today.

 Flat says. Obviously metal is the wrong material to make railways out of and making thme out of trees would be better for the environment.

 Flat says. RiverOak and Discovery Parks have it all wrong and the future is airships.

 Flat has been looking at this one for some time and hasn't said anything

 Flat Says. I thoroughly support humane traps for small animals

Flat says. Eats shoots and leaves. Ed. note the subtitle should read, The Lass at "The Man and Scythe"