Rupert Bear Annuals

As all of the grownups that have children will have noticed it’s half term and on behalf of my children here is a children’s book post.
I started by just photographing the Rupert annuals in the bookshop, but was instructed to spread them out a bit, so that people can see the covers.

With older Rupert annuals this is the only coloured bit, so arguably the best bit, and apart from the first one that had a dust wrapper the very early ones have red spines without even part of the picture on them.

I expect many bloggers will be surprised to learn that people collect Rupert annuals and Rupert book collectors cover a large age range as do Rupert annuals.

Some Rupert annuals are expensive and some are not, if they are in nice condition prices start from about £4 and go up to very expensive indeed, but a lot of collectors do swaps with us and don’t use money at all, so that’s alright.

Nice condition is called fine by book collectors, it’s the best condition for books, it means like new and that no one has written their name in the book or cut the price off.

The next condition down is called very good and this means that it isn’t fine, the next one down is called good and that means, not very good.

As this is a children’s post I am going to tell you some of the ways to spot a very expensive Rupert annual without having to remember lots of difficult things.

Some Rupert annuals are worth more than £100 and quite a good way of spotting the more valuable ones is that they don’t have the date on them.

You have to look carefully though as some of the oldest ones were done again, this is called a facsimile and it looks like an old Rupert annual apart from on the very last page where it tells you it isn’t.

Some Rupert annuals had magic painting pictures on some of the pages, when you got these pages wet the pictures went coloured, the ones where the magic paintings haven’t been done are very expensive.

The first Rupert annual was published in 1936 and most of the ones published in the 1940s were published as big floppy paperbacks because of the paper shortage during the war.

Another way of telling the more expensive Rupert annuals is that the covers aren’t shiny.

Now some thoughts about buying Rupert books, first you can’t buy most of them in new bookshops, because they don’t make them anymore, so you might find them at boot fairs or in charity shops.

The main place you will find them is in secondhand bookshops, because Rupert annuals are collectable the older ones and the ones in fine condition probably won’t be out on the shelves, where you can see them.

It is a good idea to ask the shop assistant about collectable books like Rupert annuals, he or she will probably look to see if you have clean hands and if you have dirty hands then they will say they haven’t got any.

Lots of grownups make the big mistake of thinking that the shop assistants like me, in secondhand bookshops want to sell collectable books, it’s a big misunderstanding that causes all sorts of problems.
The people in new bookshops are called sales assistants and I think this is where the misunderstanding came from.

I Would Like Some History Books, Would You Like Some Money?

One question that I am often asked as a secondhand bookseller is, what type of books do you buy? As I have a general bookshop with somewhere around 25,000 titles on the shelves, this can be a difficult question to answer.

Additional note if you are viewing this with Internet explorer you may get a message when you try to click on some of the pictures to enlarge them saying that 4.bp.blogspot.com is a dodgy site.

As this is one of the web addresses that blogger uses to host images and therefore about as likely to be a dodgy website as Amazon, eBay or indeed Microsoft there isn’t much I can do about this.

Good ones, isn’t necessarily helpful, this suggests a group of bad bokos that face the great paper recycling plant never to be read again and this is a sort of half truth.
Anyway I am going to do answering this one with lots of pictures, that should expand if you click on them, I hope this will make it easier to understand.
For the most part the problem isn’t so much one of bad books, but one of books that there are more copies of, than people to buy them
This used to be less of a problem when most people bought their books from independent bookshops, most people had different titles and the only area where one had a glut of the same titles was where people had joined book clubs.

As I am using history as an example here, then the history book club is a good example although it would serve for other subjects, in a year when about 10,000 history titles came out about 400 of these were available through the history book club, as these were cheaper lots of people bought them and in subsequent years these titles were a lot more common, bad books if you like.
In the book trade at that time one mostly overcame the problem by not buying history book club titles, for the most part the club editions were inferior quality – suck together instead of stitched together, linson instead of bookcloth ,type of job – saving the extra embarrassment of having them fall apart on the shelf.
Now of course we live in a world gone mad and proper independent new bookshops have for the most part gone, so selecting the good books, the ones that people will want to buy is a lot trickier.
If you go round the charity shops and bootfairs looking say for books on The Gunpowder Plot, the various wives and mistresses of Henry VIII, or some such thing, you probably won’t get very far.
If you are looking for a large general book on British history you will probably find one, the problem here is that if you once mentioned that you were interested in history, then large general books on the history of the world or the history of Britain turn up in droves on your birthday and at Christmas.
I do get, in the course of buying large history book collections usually after someone has died, a lot of very general history books far more that I can sell and for the most part they go in the 10p sale and if they don’t sell there they go off for pulp.
I should add here that if you go off to the large chain booksellers, you can probably get your Gunpowder Plot book or whatnot at a price and of course or you can buy one off the internet without seeing it first, this can have unexpected results.
The greatest demand for history in Ramsgate is the history of Ramsgate itself and as you can see from this area I have overcome this problem mostly by printing local history books myself.
This works up to a point and does mean that we usually have something suitable about Thanet in stock.
Some of you probably knew Mr Kemp who used to run Albion Secondhand bookshop in Broadstairs but unfortunately died last year, not long before he died we were speculating about where all the Isle of Thanet history books go to.
At that point I had more that 100 Thanet books in print and he had hardly managed buy any of them secondhand even from probate, he suggested that people were possibly taking them with them. As you can see from three shelves of Kent history books published by other people I could certainly do with some more.
History doesn’t just extend to British history, I didn’t put my world history books in as it would have been too many pictures, there is also military history.
And more military history.
Maritime history, I am always short of this because of the harbour, although not usually The Big Book of Ships.
Aviation history this also sells well, maybe because of Manston.

Transport history especially books on individual makes of car and motorbike


Incidentally the pictures are of books on the selves in my bookshop today, so if you see one you want to buy, email me michaelchild@aol.com or ring me up 01843 589500 if you want me to reserve any of them for you.

Unidentified Floating Object

Starting the day late having over slept, I wouldn’t say that it’s every parent’s worse nightmare when their child, like Martin Luther King, says I’ve had a dream, but this is a moving statement at 3am, moving mostly in as much as one has to get out of bed.

My son, not still a child apart from the in the sense that I still am, that is a Child, is very near the end of the teenage years, realising that something was amiss woke me with a cup of tea. I think otherwise I would still be asleep and have missed the bookshop altogether this morning.

The cup of tea started well, unfortunately before reality had entirely reasserted itself after my disturbed slumbers, something not unlike the fin of a small shark appeared in my cup of tea.

Fortunately I don’t take sugar, so didn’t start the day sticky and it was after all not Jaws 3 but the tip of PGs tip.

The day in the shop started with a book enquiry for “Better Sight Without Glasses” and took some time, as even with glasses everything was a bit blurry. I did, in the end, manage to find a hardback and paperback copy of the Benjamin and even a copy of “Better Eyesight Without Glasses” still with the elusive chart inside, by Bates.

This was followed by a phone call from someone writing their graduate thesis on regeneration of seaside towns, they had chosen Margate, the problem here is that the only fairly comprehensive history of Margate is “The Book of Margate” by Scurrell that sells for about £70.

This really isn’t an option for those suffering from that well know academic disease, acute skintitus, particularly virulent in Graduate Lane.

Then one in shop customer asking for that elusive book that they had apparently been looking for, for ages, I think the fact that we had one on the shelf in nice condition very cheaply threw this person so badly that instead of buying it they had to go off for a lie down or something.

Certainly a case of travelling was much better than arriving, I am finding now that with so few real bookshops of any size in southeastern England this is happening with increasing regularity.

Zen and the Art of Books and Bikes. Reflections on Top Gear, Reliant Robins, Motorcycles the internet, bookselling and computers

This is a long old ramble that wasn’t really intended for publication, the sort of thing that comes about, sitting behind the till in the bookshop between customers.

The recent Top Gear clips of the Reliant falling over so easily, have left me very suspicious that something is not right about them, some sort of set up that I don’t understand.

The same is true with internet bookselling and as these are both areas that I have some understanding in, here we go.

I learnt to drive by a rather eccentric method that didn’t involve conventional lessons, I think the same can be for secondhand bookselling, self taught is closest I can get to the description.

With the driving I started by buying a secondhand BSA motorcycle in a bits, this was a 1956 C12, I assembled this, got it insured, MOTd, taxed, drove it around for a bit and then took the test on it. This involved riding around the block in Margate while the examiner watched from the pavement, I passed first time, frankly it wasn’t difficult.

Passing this test meant that I was and still am licensed to ride all motor cycles, and I think over the years I have had over thirty of them, another thing passing this test does is that it provides one with a full licence to drive three wheeled cars.

This meant that when the winter came on I bought my first three wheeler, it was a Reliant Regal van like the one in the picture above, powered by a 750cc engine, it was quite quick reliable and economical.

The main difference between this Reliant that I think was manufactured in about 1958 and the modern ones though, was that it didn’t have an anti roll bar to help stop it from falling over.

The anti roll bar works by linking the two back springs together and makes it very difficult to get one to roll over, believe me I have tried to get the more modern Reliants up onto two wheels and it isn’t easy.

Now looking at the handling of the Reliant that they are using on Top Gear, it seems very similar to the handling of my early reliant without a roll bar, so I wonder if the Top Gear people have removed it.

But much more to the point here is what actually happens when you are driving a Reliant and it starts to roll over. First it goes up onto two wheels, at this point two things happen, one is that because one of the back wheels is off the ground it looses all power – like wheel spin due to the differential – the other is that ones natural instinct to balance it, like a bicycle or a motorcycle takes over.

I drove the van I had around for several years and although it went up on two wheels on numerous occasions, it never fell over. I am not saying that it isn’t possible to roll one over but it just isn’t easy, my brother managed to do this to another van of the same model without an anti roll bar but he did have three large German hitchhikers in the back.

One thing that I suppose you have noticed is that from top gear, is that they are very rugged indeed, but even so I think if you really did get one up to the speed where it would roll over just from cornering, then the damage from sliding along the road on its side would be much more that that shown.

I know that this is all a bit daft, but engineering things that don’t make sense bug me. Aspects of internet book buying don’t make much sense either and I have been trying to see where the secondhand book world is going now, so here are some thoughts on that, too.

In the first instance I suppose one wouldn’t expect the world of secondhand bookselling to be particularly advanced in the field of computing, I think it would be fair to say that most people who think about it at all tend to associate it with an age before the computer was invented.

On reflection too perhaps Ramsgate wasn’t the most obvious place to open a fairly large bookshop, like so many things in life though logic isn’t always at the top of the list.

I suppose the primary reason that I moved back to Ramsgate was the proximity of an aging parent, anyway in 1987 I rented a shop in King Street Ramsgate, put up lots of bookshelving and stocked it with a mixture of book remainders and the secondhand stock from my previous shop.

The first five years were fairly successful seeing year on year increases in sales and then in about 1993 the retail world started to change in this part of Kent. Most noticeable was the number of shops being converted to residential premises, something that went on until very recently and meant that over the past seventeen years I have gone from trading in the middle of a busy town centre street to trading right on the edge of the town centre.

By about 2005 it was becoming obvious that with decreasing passing trade and as always ever rising expenses I had to make some changes to the way in which I was selling books.

I think it would be reasonable to say that over this period of time passing casual trade here has pretty much ceased to exist, during the same time however the whole booktrade has changed dramatically, particularly in terms of retail outlets selling books.

When I moved to Ramsgate there were two other secondhand bookshops in the town and a large stationers and booksellers with a substantial stock of new books, also of course we had and still have the inevitable W H Smith.

Back in the early 60s and late 70s part of my engineering work involved computers so I had some experience with them, something that stopped completely in the mid 1970s when I went to work full time for the family bookshop business.

Around 2006 the internet became much more widely available in the UK as did the ownership of PCs and at this point in time I decided to buy a PC and see if there was some way to enhance the bookshop business with it.

At the time I hade some rather vague notion that I would photograph the book stock that I had and that potential customers would see on their computers how good it was and come here to buy it or contact me so I could post books to them.

What I hadn’t accounted for was the American factor, essentially what this boiled down to was that the American secondhand book world wasn’t like the one in the UK at the time. American secondhand booksellers had been using computers in very advanced ways to produce their book catalogues for a long time and with the coming of the internet they had produced both very advanced book listing software and several large unified online databases where customers could look at the stock of thousands of booksellers worldwide and search for the book they wanted.

We joined several of these databases as did many other UK booksellers and put a very large proportion of our stock onto them, about 12,000 titles, the net result of this was that a lot of our best stock got posted off all over the world, making the shop less interesting.

One way or another this happened to a great many other bookshops and two things resulted from this and the ever increasing expenses of running a shop, one was that most secondhand bookshops closed and the other was that most book customers found and bought all of the elusive titles that they knew that they wanted.

In about 2005 the whole situation changed again, two important things happened, one was that as most of the other bookshops had closed so we had very little competition in terms of shops and the other was that the firms running the larger online databases swallowed up the smaller ones.

What I did then was to look at the internet in a new way, this was mainly by identifying the ways in which it could be used to improve the bookstock in the shop, rather than use it to decimate it and to make the book prices in the shop competitive with those on the internet.

We now use a method for book pricing based around the combined cost of the book and postage of the cheapest copy of the book available online and frankly mostly because of postal costs in many cases we just can’t be beaten by the internet.

There is also a little trick that you can do with books that you never have enough copies of, which is to make them very slightly more expensive in the shop than you can get them online. This means that the proportion of people who are prepared to go through the rigmarole of first seeing the book in the shop, then checking to see if it is cheaper online and then buying it that way to save a small amount of money, make the stock much better for those who can’t be bothered.

From my own experience of buying secondhand books online, the proportion of purchases that go wrong in some way compensates for any money saved in this way.

Where the internet really comes into its own in improving the shop stock though is in terms of getting rid of books that ought to have sold in the shop but didn’t and books that have a scarcity value that makes them appear bad value for money in the context of similar books on the same subject.

This is particularly helpful in the competitive area of buying stock from the public, while new books have got considerably more expensive since 2005 prices of secondhand books have fallen on the whole.

You have to lift out of this equation those books that are produced in massive quantities for the supermarkets and the gift market, you will find the charity shops and boot fairs overflowing with these titles.

The great vat of unwanted books we deal with by pricing them at 10p or less and even at these low prices we are still taking about a ton amount for paper pulp.

Of course I am not saying here that there aren’t bargains to be had both online and in the bookshop for that matter, nor am I saying that the internet isn’t very useful when trying to get an elusive title that you aren’t likely to encounter on the shop shelves.

What I am talking about here is what I can only call the regular book buyer and although it is difficult to generalise the two most common can be described as, either the person who reads fiction and tends to accumulate all or most of the works of the authors that they like, or the person with an interest in a subject who likes to browse through a range of books about it and chose some to add to their collection.

In some ways it is looking as though electronic readers are set to replace a considerable amount of these sales and although I think that we are still a long way from a time where actual physical paper books become just historical curiosities, this new direction in publishing is bound to have a considerable effect on secondhand bookselling in the future.

Next a random look at some books on the shelf to see how they compare, obviously this is a situation that changes all the time as both the bookshop stock and the stock of online booksellers sells and gets replaced.

The three main online places that you can buy secondhand books in the UK on the internet are:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/

http://www.abebooks.com/

http://www.ebay.co.uk/

We buy and sell books using all of these and it is important to understand that when you are buying via these sites, apart from when you buy new books directly from Amazon, you are buying from a third party.

This means that every time you purchase a book via them your experience will be different and I the case of Amazon and Abe a large proportion of the booksellers listing there stock there have it listed on both sites and for sale in their bookshops.

Many of the booksellers that list on the internet fall into this bracket, this means that quite often when you order a book this way it will have already been sold to someone else, so you wont get it.

This happens to about 5% of the books I order this way, ebay works a bit differently and sellers state if the book is for sale elsewhere.

The next problem is the one of the books condition, if you understand the rules the books listed by a professional bookseller have condition descriptions that are fairly reliable, explained roughly here, poor means atrocious, good means not very good, very good means very good and fine means pretty much like new – not written in the dust wrapper not price clipped or the spine faded, no foxing and so on – this may sound all a bit picky, but for instance a lot of first editions can only be proved to be so if the price is present on the dust wrapper, so if the corner is clipped off you can’t tell if it had a price on it in the first place.

However the real problem here is that a lot of the people listing on these online sites are not professional booksellers, so I can say that about 20% of what you buy this way comes in a condition that you don’t expect.

OK I am now going to step outside the box for a bit and try and explain the non-fiction from a customer’s point of view but with a bookseller’s knowledge.

As I said I have an interest in interest in motorcycles, have often owned British motorcycles made mostly in the 1950s and have also a particular interest in how our motorcycle industry collapsed.

This means that come birthday and Christmas I often get given books with titles like “The Big Book of Motorbikes” most of the bikes that I have owned over the years have been Norton and BSA twin cylinder machines and so I though I would look on the bookshelves of the shop today and find a few motorcycle books that actually interest me that I haven’t already got.

The first one is Norton: The Racing Story (Crowood Motoclassics Series) by Mick Walker (Hardcover - 29 Aug 2002)

We have a fine copy on the shelf for £9.99

Amazon has it new for £18.95 this would attract their free postage offer, they also have six different people selling copies described as new, prices between £12.95 and £58.24 all also having the extra postage cost of £2.75 see http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1861265468/ref=sr_1_1_olp?ie=UTF8&s=gateway&qid=1279111739&sr=8-1&condition=new

It also has six secondhand copies priced between £11.40 and £72.97 also plus the £2.75 postage.

Abe have twelve copies price between £10 and £65.87 all plus between about £3 and £24 postage, see http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=walker&sts=t&tn=Norton+The+Racing+Story&x=0&y=0

Ebay have one copy priced £15 with free postage, see http://shop.ebay.co.uk/?_from=R40&_trksid=p3907.m570.l1313&_nkw=Norton+The+Racing+Story+&_sacat=See-All-Categories

My favourite motorcycle of the ones that I owned was a Norton Dominator so the next book that took my fancy was “Norton Dominator by Mick Walker (Hardcover - 24 July 2006)” cheapest Amazon copy, £8.50 plus £2.75 post this is an ex library copy see http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1861268440/ref=sr_1_1_olp?ie=UTF8&s=gateway&qid=1279112964&sr=8-1&condition=used cheapest on abe seems to be the same book at the same price see http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=walker&bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&recentlyadded=all&sortby=17&sts=t&tn=Norton+Dominator&x=54&y=14 cheapest on ebay £10.95 plus £1.75 postage http://desc.shop.ebay.co.uk/i.html?LH_TitleDesc=1&_nkw=Norton+Dominator+walker+&_cqr=true&_nkwusc=Norton+Dominator+wakler&_rdc=2

The copy on the shelf in the shop is £9.99 and in fine condition.

I won’t go on as this could get very boring.

Both of these titles started out as new titles priced at £19.95, this was a real price, not like “The Big Book of Motorbikes” with £30 printed on the cover that has only ever sold for the most at about £10, usually at garden centres and via multiples.

These are both books that I paid £5 for to sell for £10 which then takes me to the person wanting to sell the book, in the past I suppose they would have taken the books to their local second hand bookshop got their £5 each for them and that would have been it. So what about the eight people that have put their copies of the book on ebay, will any of these sell, certainly all these people will pay listing fees.

One of the customers today was a chap who was off on a cruise and bought a big pile of Wilber Smith and Jack Higgins paperbacks to read, lose on the way, give to people he met and any of the other thing that happen to paperbacks on holiday. The 30 or so books he bought in various conditions came to about £45, and I tried to do something similar on the internet just now. Frankly you either do it expensively or you are looking at about a days work to get anywhere near the prices that he paid in the bookshop.

I suppose the problem here is that rather like the world of small shops the large multinational companies are always looking for profit, at the moment with the way they are running internet selling sites they are already getting a very substantial proportion of any profit, particularly with lower priced items.
The problem may be that as this goes on they want more and more of the cake.

Ramble from the secondhand book trade

Another local history book just about out today, Picturesque Excursion to Margate,
Ramsgate and Broadstairs and Their Neighbourhoods, this little guide is the Isle of Thanet part of a larger guide to various resorts in southern England first published in 1839, copies of the original guide are fairly scarce selling at around £100 and therefore inaccessible to many people.

My reprint is priced at £3.99 and will be available online when I get around to it, at the moment it is available in the bookshop.

I was up early yesterday due to the heat and so I went to the a couple of boot fairs, I didn’t do too badly in terms of buying a few unusual books goes although in terms of ordinary modern books go the usefulness of the boot fair is pretty much over for the secondhand bookseller.

This is a situation caused by the supermarkets and I will explain it in some detail as the reasons that bookshops are failing are in the national news again today.

If you take the period that the net book agreement was in force in this country 1900 to about 1995, I think it would be fair to say that this country had both pretty much the cheapest and the greatest diversity of books.

What the net book agreement did was to fix the minimum price for each book, something that meant that the supermarkets and big chains couldn’t undercut the independent bookshop.

Each bookshop in the UK had a different stock, chosen by the people running it and the whole thing was essentially financed by the profits on the few bestsellers.

During most of the last century my family owned bookshops in various parts of the UK mostly Hertfordshire, for some time I traded in the town of Hitchin where there were three bookshops, one specialising in academic books – also supplying local schools and collages, one specialising in military and transport books and the one I was running specialising in the arts and literature.

Sometime in the 1990s the net book agreement collapsed, this was for the most part due to two large chains of bookshops Dillons and Waterstones and pressure from the large supermarkets mostly Asda.

Between about 1995 and 1999 about 500 independent bookshops closed and by now 2010 pretty much all of them have closed, Albion Bookshops in Canterbury, Broadstairs and Cliftonville are examples.

This has lead to a situation where most books seem to be sold now in the supermarket at prices that appear to be special offers, although there is now no set price for books, with the demise of the agreement, prices presumably fictitious are still printed on books and the whole business of new bookselling seems to rotate around discounts from these fictitious prices.

Looking at the new book world, as I do now from the secondhand book world, what is bought, promoted and ultimately sold by the supermarkets, seems to be based around the trade discount more than either quality of value for money.

A problem though from the secondhand booksellers point of view, is that the majority of the people at the boot fairs now all have the same few titles, by this I mean the ones that were sold by the big chain supermarkets on special offer during the last few years.

I am not saying here that I didn’t do ok at the boot fairs, in fact I did very well indeed, stocking up on some basic non fiction, some bread and butter classics, from Winnie the Poo to Julian of Norwich, some basic reference and informative non-fiction from The Penguin Dictionary of Saints an essential item in many libraries that will go out on the shelf priced between £2 and £3, Albert Schweitzer’s biography of J.S. Bach a 1940s two volume A &C Black edition still in dustwrappers, not an expensive item but very much a copy that looks the part. Bread and butter fiction like, The Power and the Glory and Brideshead Revisited, were part of the batch too. Some collectors items like Ladybird books and Observers books, collectable maybe but the prices are likely to be between 99p and £3, which means that one can still enjoy book collecting without having a serious effect on the budget, the star item was a first edition of The Olive Fairy Book, the closest copy on the internet is listed at £660.

This brings up the problems that the internet puts to the secondhand bookseller, I consider a proper and reasonable price for this book in a condition that I would describe as near fine to be about £200 however the internet has made a mockery of such professional judgement.

This means that I will list it to start with at about £600 and reduce the price every few months until it sells, frankly the eventual selling price could be anywhere between £50 and £600.

Another star buy was Louis Wain: the Man Who Drew Cats by Rodney Dale this is the revised 2000 edition and should reasonably sell for about £30, it is listed on Amazon for £117, not a realistic price, but this sort of thing is very difficult if someone has a copy that they want to sell to me and have looked it up on the internet.

What one says in these circumstances is a bit beyond me, but somewhere in the reply is perhaps the reason why people are still going to want a collection of books in years to come. The problem stems from the fact that anyone can put any piece of information on the internet, however misleading and however badly researched and the gullible will always take it as fact.

Dynamo Day in Ramsgate and the secondhand bookshop.

I would imagine that some of the people coming for tomorrows celebration of the 70tth anniversary of Operation Dynamo will be considering visiting the secondhand bookshop and that they are most likely to be interested in the military and transport sections.

I have just photographed the stock in them, not easy to get everything in focus but I hope it is of some help to people, click on the link for the pictures of the books on the shelves today http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/510b/id14.htm

Prices of books in the bookshop start at 5p per book, I would say the average price being about £2.50 for a paperback and about £7 for a hardback, although some of our more collectable and scarce books are much more expensive.

The picture (click on it and then click on it again to make it big enough to read) above is from one of these collectable books, “Aide Memoire to the Military Sciences. Framed from contributions of officers of the different services, and edited by a committee of the Corps of Royal Engineers.”

Second Edition revised, enlarged and corrected. 3 volumes published between 1853 and 1862. viii and 545 pages; ii and 589 pages; ii and 800 pages. with numerous plates and wood-cuts. Tall 8vo. All three volumes rebound with marbled boards and marbled endpapers, maroon half-leather, with raised bands at spine and red leather labels with gilt titles.

I never know if this sort of post is seen as advertising, or just bringing to peoples attention another cultural facility in Ramsgate, anyway what you see is what there is.

Oh and just a reminder that we are closed on Thursdays and Sundays.