Materialise It Mark is a Gem!

Being the sort of Bookshop Boss I am, I am a very hands on creative type (well that's what I tell myself!) and as did many people I once had delusions of Blue Peter and Magpie style Grandeur - that is to say I believe I can build anything out of cardboard rolls, double sided sticky tape, and cable ties - and to demonstrate this fact on Monday I duly did do some cardboard technology work using a cut off end of a spare cannibalised card unit to make some units for the counter.
Now I admit that by the end of the day though they had things in them they were still a work in progress and were waiting to be covered with coloured paper, spud prints or sticky back plastic to make them look somewhat better - but hey that was the next days adventure and I was justifiably pleased with them as they had doubled the stock I could put on the tops and the darn Bingo Dabbers and Bingo Markers were no longer falling over anytime someone even looked at the counter! Oh and the packs of playing cards and the Biro's and Pencils were also once again visible to the human eye of someone taller than the average 3 year old.

Good stuff I thought and pleased I was (probably because no minions were on site to scoff at the impressive feat of design genius!), and then along came my friend Mark H from off the Materialise It stall further up the aisle - now for any that haven't been to visit in person Materialise It is an absolutely must see stall, especially for all those Sci-Fi fiends like me! Marks stall sells Sci-Fi collectibles, models and toys. Yep Millennium Falcons abound, Yoda and wookies astound, Daleks and Doctors aplenty, Battlestar Gallactica surrounds and Marvel Characters stand out! yep you name it and it's probably there, and along with these are cool posters, signed Photo's and lots extra as well - oh and its also the place to get a Chess set as well.
So anyway Mark comes in to say good night sort of thing and looks at the fantastic cardboard creations and gets this look on his face like he just smelled curdled milk! and with that points out all the lovely backing left over from the new bookcases and says you can do something with that to make units, to which I start thinking veneer, the curdled milk look at this point is more a sneer!
See Mark is pretty good at turning out incredibly complex dovetailed drawers and pine shelving units from scratch - me? not so much!.

So anyway the next day Mark comes in and gets some of my nice shelf backings and about 40 minutes later brings down this work of art!

Now isn't it just fantastic - safe to say that though i had been proud of mine upon seeing this little gem I became shamed and immediately consigned it to the rubbish bin, but even better was that today he made me the opposite sides unit as well - purpose built for the items I needed displaying!


The man is a genius and an artisan and not just a cool sci-fi dood - my shop may replicate the TARDIS in being able to stretch the dimensions and fit in more than it should, but Mark is definitely a strong contender for talented Dr's Companion, definitely an Adric in the making (though hopefully without heroic but sad ending at the hands of a cyberman).

So Mark, thank you! and all of you out there go visit him next time you're in - honestly he has some of the coolest things in the Market - after our own stuff of course!, including two daleks on top of his stall and looking straight down the aisle to the main doors by us.

OK gushing over for now - minions are on half term so I am having to do all the work again!

So anyway just to remind everyone Lent and Easter are nearly here so please get the orders in for Palm Crosses and Paschal Candles - they are all in, but we have already gone through 30 bunches of Palm Crosses, one box of Paschal Candles - and I don't want it to be like Advent when two days before the start, and one day after the sets are gone, lots of people start showing up looking and getting upset.

As a small Independent business I can only get in what I am pretty sure will sell, so if you let me know you want it I can ensure it will be here, but if not then you do risk it not being in stock at the last knockings.

Oh Easter Cards and Mothering Sunday Cards are also in stock - as are the Church Group bundles and Packs of Crosses and bookmarks etc.

Today I sent off a CBC order for gifts, rosaries and other Communion and Confirmation items, these should be in early next week.

On other fronts Sherrilyn Kenyon's 'Dream Hunter' has been in and sold out, and is expected back in later this week, as is 'At Grave's End' by Frost.
Westerns seem to be doing well at the minute, Louis L'Amour, William Johnstone and lots of other Key Western Authors are in stock and selling well.

Oh and the sale is ongoing with orange cross 50p books still available and new books at £1.25 or 5 for £5 still available - come by and see, and remember if you cant come in person then please use our Amazon affiliate sites to buy your stuff!
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http://astore.amazon.co.uk/lincolncentralmarket-21
Our everything Ashop.
Please support us however you can and we would love it if you would link to our Ashops or help promote them, or any of our sites or activites if you can, and remember come by and visit and don't forget the bookshopboss likes coffee with caramel shots!
see you in shop in the morning!

Nearly there!

Nearly there with the big move!
All the fixtures are shifted, religious is now fully housed in the main bookshop now.
Mostly everything is put back together and where it should be, and today the new till arrived and was set up - the new printer/fax/phone unit should hopefully arrive sometime this week too and then we are pretty much fully up and running in our new style shop.
At the moment other than continuing to tidy up and remerch sections as we go we are currently working on redoing Als Arts & Crafts section. It has benefitted from new Slat board and a new outer wall!
Honestly we really do think the stall is some sort of relation to the tardis! as we have moved everything into the main bookstall and increased the space to expand religious/christian books and no we don't know how that happened - well we do but what we cant work out is the physics of it!
So give me to the end of the week and hopefully there will be new pictures up of the new look bookshop!
Honestly it is great - tiring but so good to see it happening and being done with it.
It's all coming together and I give thanks to God for the ability to see it and do it along with the minions.
Minion no. 1 really does deserve the starbucks she has been getting, come to that so do I - lol.
So anyway just to let peeps know - the Easter cards are in (with more to follow!) and there is a great new range of fantastic looking and incredibly cheaply priced bookmarks in from Kevin Mayhew - our favourite: Those who say it cannot be done should get out of the way of those doing it!
Large Ingrams delivery also came in today - so all you sci-fi & paranormal readers have a bumper crop of new releases from the stateside to enjoy!
Anyway sure there is a lot more to say, but as it's another early day start to enable more tidying up and finishing to be done I am signing off with a see you tommorow in the shop.

Some days the dragon wins

There really are some days the dragon wins, and there are some days it just doesn't win but it chews you up, spits you out and then flame roasts you to top it off! and today was one of those days.

First of all everyone is suffering cold symptoms thus making the day feel full of fun from the start, then its Christmas decoration time (Bah humbug - can we say carbon emmission protocols! what's with the lights and electricity overuse!) so lights are going up and thats a lot of work for the minions to do - though they seemed to be enjoying it and after decorating one space wanted to continue on! maybe i should get them some elf ears to go with the red noses from the cold symptoms??

So anyway thats all going on and customers are coming in ( that we like) and we are getting on with the serving when in the middle of trying to do one thing, I am expected to  multitask another job. so not fair and the day goes on.

Anyway suffice to say slightly later on we have a minion meltdown - probably caused by an excess of christmas lights and cold symptoms - but one of the minions has a dosey of a meltdown and goes home. Lets hope it all blows over soon and they are back at work as normal in due course as life without minions is so unfulfilling at times.

Anyway life goes on after minion, and I begin to re-enter the order that the computer ate on Saturday - I kid you not, saturday was a busting day - very christmas shopper busy - lots of Military and Steam Engine DVD's whizzing out the store, along with books,  jigsaws and Paint by Numbers and to top it off I had a spinner and four massive boxes of Velvet Arts delivered - very nice designs of Playboy Bunnies being Exterminated by Daleks whilst Betty Boop stands and screams and Homer Simpson wonders whats going on! hey whizzed out the shop too, well at £1.25 or 5 for £5 they are just too good a bargain to stay still!

So anyway they came in and i had 2 bumper boxes of Fairway Christian Books to get on the system and out, so i duly batch them through like a trojan, all scanned found and entered, and then shelved - I then whizzed on to putting out the 186 secondhand books that were sitting on the counters waiting to be stickered and shelved - did that just to have  a woman bring in 56 Josephine Cox books that then have to be dealt with - and I do, but then someone else comes in with 27 various sci-fi authors, I tell you it was never ending! but by the end of the day it was all done! yahhoo! 

However today i go to do stock re-ordering and find that the fairway books that have been sold are showing as not on the system!!! so i dig deeper as that cannot be right! and sure enough it isn't right, they are on the system - they are there, i did not dream entering 37 lines oh no - I did indeed enter them but in the wrong darn database! it would seem that there are 2 databases on the system and that on saturday the wrong one was opened for some reason and all the days work was entered onto the old dead database and not the nice new live one! and can they be transferred? no they have to be re-input! 

Still at least it explains why the database seems to sometimes eat titles we know we have had in! They are there in the wrong database! so what causes the wrong database to open occasionally - well on that one we do not have a clue, but at least we now know to check the database first thing in the morning so we can rectify any future fiasco's like this.

Talking of dragons! 

Anne and Todd McCaffrey's latest dragons of Pern book is now on the shelves, both American and UK covers are in!

It's called Dragon's Fire (ISBN: 978-0345480293) and is priced at £6.99 and is an absolutely brilliant book for Pern fans, what is so brilliant about it for me though is that one of the main characters in it is disabled, he cannot speak, and this really adds some extra dimension to the story. So anyway this is a really good book and well worth a read - I must admit to liking the collaborative books between ms McCaffrey and her son in the pern-verse and this one is good - pop in and get it ( oh and the US cover is much more colourful than the UK edition!).

So anyway that was the fun today, being a bookshopboss is sometimes a lot like work! see you in the shop tomorrow.

The Bookcase Boogie

OHHH! my arms really ache and I have bruises on my biceps!

Today was long, hassled and hectic as me and minion numero uno did the bookshelf boogie today, that is to say that at 8:30 this morning 7 full sized and dismantled bookcases were delivered, and had to be pieced together whilst at the same time the old pine -My Goodness how many screws did the chippie have to use!!!- units, which were designed by satan himself to confound even the best krypton factor contestant, had to be cleared of books and taken apart.
Was it fun - not after the first 20 minutes! but did it get done?? Yes it did and we even served customers in between - now if you were one of those poor bewildered customers, well my apologies but hey it looks neater now!
So anyway at 4:30 we packed away the tools, removed screwdriver bits from yielding flesh and left a mess of disorganzied sci-fi sitting on new shelves.

So anyway just so you know if you come in tomorrow we will be doing the abc song a lot as we try to reorganize the sci-fi shelves, the historic fiction section and the white - true life (cry Cry) - books, both new and secondhand.
Oh and by the way thats the second rejig and shelf shuttle in just over 2 weeks, as we redid crime and thriller, - it really was miss scarlett in the library with the hammer! - childrens corner and made a whole new section for religious/christian books and lots of space for the communion wafers which came in last week.
It is beginning to look like a bookshop!.

Anyway just to let you all know it is safe to come back in and get some books without too much disruption around you for about the next 2 weeks now, as we won't be able to do anymore now until we have thoroughly worked out the dimensions of the secondhand department and exactly how to reshuffle it to fit in at least another 3 bays of books!
We just still need more shelf space - lots more books to get in and display nicely so that you, my beloved and adored legions of customers (yes thats you, you twits!) can come along and buy them!

Oh by the way just so you all knows, the first STL order came in today - yay at last, christian books fully on tap and in in a jif!
and we also had a bumper delivery in of criss-cross and codebreaker puzzle books, so hopefully that should please a few of you ( I am going to keep some hidden so i dont get moaned at when they are all gone!).
We are also expecting a giant delivery of paint by numbers and engraving art/scraperfoils in, there are at least 7 new designs ordered and the bumper packs and the acrylic canvasses are absolutely fantastic and will make the best christmas gifts!!

Right that's it, I am done and need to go relax and uncramp in a bath of radox muscle ease! perhaps with a nice glass of ovaltine or something like that so I am fit and ready for minions, customers and the fray of a friday morning!

Be good all my little frosticles of joy and remember to put the gloves on the radiator as it keeps the fingers warmer! see you in the shop tomorrow.