Books about Ramsgate Margate Broadstairs and East Kent
Click on the links on the left to look at the books
If you are interested in our local books its a good time to visit the shop as we have a local book sale on at the moment, the books in the sale are either shop soiled, have minor errors or defects. These offers are not available on books bought online.
Ramsgate Coast Guard station about 1870
When Ramsgate library burnt down and our collection of local books was destroyed I decided that the safest way to protect scarce copies of our local history books was to produce affordable reprints of them. It's now over two years since I bought the printing equipment and started work on the project.
The books fall roughly into three categories, reprints of old books about the area that have been out of print for many years - the type of thing that one would expect to find in the local archives, directories of local people and buildings - to help you to learn more about the history of your family or house and books about this area published by us for the first time - in many cases these would never be published by a commercial publisher, nor would the authors be able to afford to publish or be able to distribute them, themselves.
Printing the books as I need them means it isn't necessary to invest a large sum in any individual publication, and that I can get on with the next one straight away. One of the local authors whose book we stock had it printed himself, 800 copies cost him £12,000, the cost of the initial print run of this book i.e. 20 copies was much more manageable. I always find it surprising that the ink costs a lot more than the card and paper.
What is really nice is that when an author comes along with a book that they have written about the local area, I don't have to produce that strange sound of air rushing through the teeth that means something very expensive is going to happen, but merely tell them that they will get a 10% royalty on the selling price of the copies I print.
By using Paypal to pay for your books you are protected against credit card fraud, they are a large international company who process you card and pay the money into my account without me seeing your card details.
