New Years Eve

Shop furniture and carpets mostly back in place, and the shopkeeper was greeted to the working day by W. B. Yeats on the doormat (many thanks anonymous).

subliminal advertising?

Interesting diversity of customers today including an Australian who refused to spend thirty Aussie dollars on Paul Auster's 4321 novel back home, and an Israeli who can't find a place in England to sell books written in Hebrew. We stock the occasional bible in Hebrew, and dictionaries too, but general reading, sorry we don't have the space.

See you next year!

Secondhand Bookshops Introductory Post

We already have a couple of active blogs

Thanetonline

Which is Michael's general blog mostly covering stuff related to this part of the UK i.e. the most eastern part of Kent which once was an island and is sill called The Isle of Thanet, now a triangle containing Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs

Michael's Bookshop

Which is photos of the books we price and put out on the shelves in the bookshop every working day.

The view from my desk looks like this, a desk behind a desk, there are eight of us who work in this bookshop, although not all at the same time there are three desks behind the till desk.

There is a lot of using computers in our work and with the recent report saying:-

• More hours of screen time are associated with lower well-being

• High users show less curiosity, self-control, and emotional stability.

• Twice as many high (vs. low) users of screens had an anxiety or depression diagnosis.

• Non-users and low users did not differ in well-being.

• Associations with well-being were larger for adolescents than for children.

we are a getting bit worried.

Here is the link to the report

Back in the day the main sources of information pricing books were on paper 

The queen of this being BAR or Book Auction Records

I's afraid drawing on my own toolkit here does show may age a bit when going down this particular rabbit hole where first editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland could be bought for less that £1,000.

My father managed bookshops from before I was born with me working on and off in them from the time I was a teenager, I was also a sort of mechanic for a bit, but mostly it's been shop assistant in a secondhand bookshop, the last 50 years.

Sorry lost the thread here a bit.

Back to the report, survey, wosisname, apart from this seeming to say that reading about what's down rabbit hole, on a device, kindle, phone, laptop, desktop or tablet, is going make you. what? 80% more stupid. So is watching it on TV I guess.

There is an aspect of this more along the lines of, 'Always look on the bright side.' Than, every cloud...

I am trying to type this out with the screen turned off, but it's altogether more tricky than you would think.