Fiction authors beginning with A on the shelf today.

I would guess in terms of a reasonably good range of fiction at prices which compete with the internet we probably have the best range in southeast England. So as part of using this blog to promote my bookshop I will be photographing the books on the shelves and giving you some idea of the price for a walk in customer.

So starting with fiction authors whose names start with A, prices vary between 20p and £4 with most being between £1.50 and £2.50, at the time of pricing we will have looked them up on Amazon and made our prices less than the Amazon prices including postage.

So here are the photos of the general fiction books whose authors names begin with A on the shelf today they should expand when clicked on.

 here are the hardbacks

here are the collectable and first editions

 here the crime fiction

science fiction, horror and fantasy

childrens

 I aim to do the Bs soon 

Blog moves back to Thanetonline

Having spoken to several occasional blog readers recently I have come to the conclusion that I am inexorably connected to the thanetonline blog and am moving my main blogging activities back there.

I will probably just use the michaelsbookshop blog to let people know what is going on in my bookshop, stock coming in, features on book sections and so on.

The Thanet Local Plan Consultation and some thoughts on how to respond to it.

Thanet District Council have opened their online consultation for the new local plan.

What the council has done is come up with a draft plan for Thanet covering the next fifteen years and is asking people to comment on it.

The main snag seems to be the way the closure of Manston airport has impacted on the draft plan inasmuch as a great deal of the plan has been written around the assumption that thanet will have a functioning passenger and freight airport.

I would say we really are back to the problem of no plan B for how Thanet ought to function with a mixed use non aviation development at Manston. As there is the probability that Manston will never be an airport again then it seems pretty obvious that the local plan for Thanet during the next fifteen years should in some way address this eventuality.

A very big issue here is that the Manston site is a brownfield site so it doesn't have the protection from development that farmland has. A secondary issue here is its planning status as it didn’t ever manage to get planning consent as an airport, so some sort of plan B in the local plan would be about the only protection that this large open area could get.

A similar issue with Port Ramsgate, the council don’t seem to accept the fact that it is highly unlikely to get anything other than commercial operations that other places don't want, and that the likelihood of a viable ferry operator at Port Ramsgate is pretty much zero.

The draft local plan seems to open the way for any sort of undesirable industrial activity there, without taking into account how close the port is to residential accommodation or that the prevailing wind direction means that dust and pollution is blown across the marina and the main sands.

There are many examples of the draft local plan looking fairly positive, but actually opening the way for some extremely harmful activity, an example of this is the part about Ramsgate Town Centre, it looks OK if you don’t ever go shopping in Ramsgate. In practice though it ignores the only town centre car park that most shoppers are comfortable with using and marks it as a potential development site. Then you have the business of the parts of the shopping centre they have mapped out for letting go back to residential, they call this secondary frontage and it’s a measure of how out of touch with Ramsgate they are that it includes Iceland and Morrisons supermarkets. This opens the way for turning the shops near the main shopping car park into residential and probably eventually building social housing on the car park.     

I have had a chat with the council about filling in the questionnaire and it seems that the online facility is much more flexible than it looks.

Once you have either logged on or joined up you can change or add to what you have put in the various fields right up to the date the consultation finishes, this is particularly useful with areas like the airport and port where the situation is changing and may be different in six weeks time.

There were two areas where I made recommendations to the council which I will send to them in writing, one is that I thought it could be very helpful if they were to make a video presentation along the lines of what they would say to people at drop in sessions and put it on YouTube so that we could all become familiar with aspects of the local plan when we had time, the other was that responses to the local plan should be weighted towards those submitted by local residents and organisations.

You can download the whole plan as a pdf and the questionnaire as a pdf or Word document, this is a bit clumsy as you have to use both documents at the same time. Alternatively you can use “respond online” facility which is a combination of the two, i.e. the bit you comment about is with the bit where you put the comments. and as you can go back into this and change anything right up to finishing deadline on 6th of March, I think this is the best way to deal with the consultation.                  

Here is the link to the consultation website https://consult.thanet.gov.uk/consult.ti/TPODLP/consultationHome

Confidential Manston cpo documents appear on the internet and a possible further ramble.

 These have appeared on various FaceBook pages including Manston Pickle which I think is an open site, see https://www.facebook.com/manstonpickle  

I am reluctant to link to the actual posts. See the end of this post if you don’t follow what I am talking about http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/plane-tales-from-bookshop-manston.html

 For me the interesting part is the peculiar game being played by RiverOak by sending the documents to all TDC councillors without putting them on one of their various websites, so they are in that strange position of being partly in the public domain.

 What the documents don’t answer is what appears to be the council’s main reasons why they didn’t select RiverOak as an indemnity partner: failure to be compliant with UK council’s money laundering requirements, failure to provide indemnity against compensation claims from the owners in the event of the cpo failing and not really seeming to get anywhere near the sort of valuation ballpark that a 600 acre brownfield site that’s last use was an airport that hadn’t obtained an EP in order to get planning consent would be in.  

 To me the distribution of these documents followed by the inevitable leakage into the public domain combined with RiverOak stating publicly that the had relinquished confidentiality requirements relating to the documents seems a very strange move.

 I would think it would be difficult for any level of government to deal with an organisation that acted in this way and as far as I can see leaves the council in a difficult position.  

 RiverOak distributing documents directly to councillors who obviously have no confidentiality agreement with RiverOak sees to fall in to the “Dear Honourable Councillor” bracket of one of RiverOak’s previous emails.

 All of the pictures in this post are from a book I publish about the first civil aviation activates at Manston in the 1960’s, click on the link for more http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/1997_twilight_of_pistons.htm the sample pages should of interest to some people.

 

The slow rush to a bookshop sale, and a new technological discovery that will change the way we interact with technology.

There is a sense in which the price or value of a book depends or depended on where it is, back in the day, which I guess means before the internet; this was much more the case.

For us in the bookshop, with the nonfiction in particular, creating sections or areas in the bookshop where you can have a browse of the books that interest you, is what we try to achieve.

This creates something of a problem when it comes to dealing with the January sales, I will try to explain this with some of the books about antiques and collecting in my bookshop, photos in the post which should expand if clicked on.

Now back in the day - before the internet - your average book about antiques was published between around £15 and £25, this meant that a fine (like new) copy sold secondhand for between around £6 and £12, as a slight aside to this we would have been buying them from people for between around £3 and £6. The way we did the sale wasn’t rocket science, we went around the bookshop pulling off the books that had been on the shelf for longer than three years or had been damaged in stock, halved the price (to around what we had paid for them) piled them up on a table in the bookshop and after two or three weeks they had pretty much all gone.

Now I would say that if you took an average collection of books about antiques in the bookcase of someone who has collected antiques for the last forty years and bought or received as presents new books about antiques during that time the price structure has changed.   

I would expect about three quarters of them to be on Amazon for a 1p and only about 5% of them not to be available online for a price including postage that actually covered the postage. Add to this the books about antiques which have been replaced by the internet, which are mostly the very general books with a small amount of information about a lot of different antiques - like the internet has - and you are left with the a considerable amount of books which assessed realistically need pricing at less than £1 each.   

After some consideration I have put the antiques books that I have reduced to less than £1 on the bottom shelves of the antiques section.  

Below are the pictures of them, no signage or sale posters yet .

I was last at the cutting edge of technology in about 1972 and since that time I have seen a lot of devices improved, made smaller, more sensitive, less subject to interference, but very little which is actually a new invention or discovery, particularly in the area of the connection between man and machine.

With sensory connection between man and electrical machine probably sound is the oldest, one that has worked both ways i.e. the sound goes in and comes out with the telephone and the simplest form of amplification is a diaphragm compressing ground charcoal, which alters its electrical resistance, put this in series with a battery and the electrical version of the sound wave will travel a long way along a wire.

I would guess this discovery/invention is one of the most important in the last 150 years inasmuch as an electrical impulse can be turned into something non physical we can touch. So far we have been able to transmit sound and vision and it seems that transmitting the caress is now possible http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30553159 http://ultrahaptics.com/

I think the implications here are in the same order as the microphone, loudspeaker, TV screen, printer or photographic film. An example here is the surgeon in London should be able to use a robot to perform an operation in Paris while feeling the resistance of the cutting scalpel.

The implications of people being able to touch each other across the internet are truly mind boggling. 

Oh and as no local blog post is complete without some reference to Manston the cabinet decision no to proceed with the cpo has been called in, see http://democracy.thanet.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=119&MId=3469 

And this email about Manston doing the rounds. I think for a 600 acre brownfield site this comes out at £250k per acre which seem a bit on the low side to me.

  

Post Christmas ramble

We did the last of the family and friends Christmas dinners yesterday and tomorrow the children go back to school, I think tomorrow is the last twelfth day of Christmas. As our closing day in the bookshop is Thursday and so was Christmas and new years day we only got one extra day off this year so this combined with lots of entertaining in the evenings has meant that I haven’t had time for painting and drawing.    

I am back to trying to get a likeness into very small pen sketches of authors, and now blogging because the lack of practice means I have cramp in my hand.

The big Ramsgate story of the day appears to be soapsuds in the Madeira Walk waterfall, back in the 1960s the washing powder Tide was the most sensational of the bubble making agents, causing a wall of foam on the road below.

I guess there are those of us who spent our childhood or teens in Ramsgate and had access to various soap products with various results and those who didn’t, it’s rather like diving of the fish quay in the harbour, personally I blame the parents as the probably did it too.

I was interested on our mission to Iceland – the shop not the country – today to notice that Easter stock is already out, so commercially Christmas presumably is over. 

I suppose no blog post is complete at the moment without some mention of Manston so the latest two new things are the poll at the bottom of the Your Thanet homepage http://www.yourthanet.co.uk/home this comes out decisively against the RiverOak proposal for a freight only commercial airport but isn’t much use as what we are probably going to get is what the owners want to do wasn’t one of the options. I guess over the years Your Thanet seems to have become more disconnected from Thanet so the journalists there probably didn’t know about the Discovery Parks proposals. The other is the uk parliament is still looking at Manston. The House of Commons Transport Select Committee will hold a Manston oral evidence session on Monday February 2.

I don’t see there is any chance now of the Manston petiton to parliament reaching the level requited to trigger a parliamentary debate, see http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/62738 this would be 100,000 signatures about 10% of the voting population of Kent and the petition hasn’t reached 3% of the required signature level.

Back to the drawing board and I intend to take my drawing of people in ink to full bodies, although if the internet has fairly ordinary pictures of standing nudes, facing the camera without their feet cut off, I am yet to find them.

The main reason I have been using pen is that I would need to take a can of fixative out with me if I sketch in pencil. The idea being to try to likenesses into the people in the pencil sketches I do out and about.

I suppose the other local news item is that the council’s chief executive has resigned, although as she has been on extended leave of absence it isn’t very newsy news.

Talking to the various council officers I know I think a major issue could well be attracting good candidates for the post, I think Thanet Council is getting a bit of a name for itself as not such a good place to work for.

  We have just eaten the last turkey and ham pie and turkey curry should finish it off for a while.  

Cramp again so a couple more sketches of authors and I am working on the nudes, which I have only ever sketched in pencil or paint before, I will put them up on one of my other blogs http://pencilandwatercolour.blogspot.co.uk/

I am getting a fair amount of hostile comment at the moment, most of which never gets published as it doesn’t comply with the comment guidelines, but I don’t want some hostile commentator getting a content warning put on this blog.  

I will ramble on here if I get cramp from drawing again.

About 250 photos of Ramsgate Christmas Lights 2 Jan 2015

Low light photography isn’t an exact science and I have pasted all of the pictures taken this evening straight from my camera’s memory card to three web pages, here are the links

http://michaelsbookshop.com/ramsgateharbourchristmaslights/

http://michaelsbookshop.com/ramsgateharbourchristmaslights/id3.htm

http://michaelsbookshop.com/ramsgateharbourchristmaslights/id4.htm

I would guess it will about 11.30 before all of the pictures have uploaded onto the web, the good the bad and the outright dreadful.