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20170825124113

Cover Artist: Issue 55, Jemma Lewis, Hand-marbled paper, ‘Bloomsbury Blue & Orange Botanical’

After graduating in Textile Art in Norwich Jemma Lewis worked for several years at a local bookbinding firm where she became fascinated with the marbled papers found on the binding of antiquarian books. She set up her own marbling business in 2009 and now works with her husband Craig in a purpose-built log cabin in their garden in Wiltshire. Their marbled papers are created by using traditional techniques, floating gouache paints on to a ‘size’ of carragheen moss, an Irish seaweed. They produce collections of both traditional and contemporary marbled papers, and often combine the two, using a modern-day palette to update historic designs.
20170803161109 Sword of Bone, Anthony Rhodes, Slightly Foxed

Dunkirk: An unofficial history

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the book of the film is usually rather better than the film itself, as Jane Austen certainly never said, but we like to think she would agree. Having not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s latest cinematic offering, Dunkirk, we shall have to reserve judgement on this occasion, but we can be absolutely certain that as memoirs from the Second World War go, and especially those related to Dunkirk, Anthony Rhodes’s Sword of Bone is outstanding.
20170726144549 Kathleen Lindsley, Tawny Owl Issue 43

Tawny Owl

Kathleen Lindsley

From the very first issue of Slightly Foxed we’ve championed the art of wood engraving as a form of book illustration and, over the years, have reproduced a wide variety of works by some of the best artists in the field. These richly detailed illustrations became so popular with our readers that we decided to give some of our favourite works a life outside the bounds of text illustration and, from the autumn 2014 issue, have run an occasional series of standalone features on engravers. This Tawny Owl by Kathleen Lindsley was the first to be featured in our Slightly Foxed wood engravers series.
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Our readers write . . .

F. Marsh, Norfolk

‘Thank you to all at Slightly Foxed for the full set of Ronald Welch’s Carey novels you have produced over the last couple of years. I am enjoying working my way through them again and am very pleased to have finally completed my collection of these wonderful historical novels after 45 years. I was very pleased to read that you are publishing Mr Welch’s Sun of York in the spring. This was my favourite of all of his novels when I was growing up. Thank you once again for republishing these great books.’
20170721172908 Holiday reading, Slightly Foxed

Re. your request for ideas for holiday reading:-

Once a month or so throughout the year, we meet around the kitchen table here at No. 53 to discuss the all-important ins and outs of Slightly Foxed business. We pore over officious spreadsheets and schedules, mutter about analytics and databases, discuss logistics for our annual Readers’ Day, mull over binding cloth and endpaper colour combinations, and then rattle through marketing before getting down to the VIP business of jollity. And, what could be jollier than not one, but two summer wayzgooses?
20170721145355 Miles Kington

Just people being enthusiastic, almost evangelical, about books and writers . . .

Miles Kington, writing in the Independent, December 2007

‘I come to you today to sing the praises of something which restores the colour to the cheeks of the word “bookish”, namely the magazine called Slightly Foxed. Have you come across this? You have to keep your eyes open as it is a quarterly – the issues are Spring, Summer, etc – and is entirely dedicated to pieces by writers about other writers they have loved, or feel are neglected, or whom we may take for granted . . .
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Plain Jane? Plain Wrong

Daisy Hay on Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

There is nothing ‘common-place’ about Pride and Prejudice. It has a tightly woven, seductively intricate plot, which unfolds so delicately that the reader falls blindly into the traps of imperception set by the author, alongside that most perfect of imperfect heroines, Elizabeth Bennet. It has dialogue which sparkles and sings in the most extraordinary way, so that characters come alive in only a few words. It has a hero and heroine who fence and fight and fall in love . . .

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Ploughing On

Hazel Wood, Preface to Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree

The writer Adrian Bell first arrived in Suffolk in 1920 – a delicate young would-be poet, fresh from public school at Uppingham and the polite drawing-rooms of Chelsea, under pressure from his father, who was news editor of the Observer, to get a proper job. He was, he says, ‘flying from the threat of office life’ when he first presented himself for work on the farm of an old-established farming family in the countryside near Bury St Edmunds.
20151213164349 Quentin Blake, Mr Fox - Travis Elborough, Roald Dahl, from Slightly Foxed Issue 24, Winter 2009

A Brush with the Law

Travis Elborough on Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr Fox

I recall being mildly disappointed that the factory in Charlie and the Chocolate was not fashioned solely from chocolate. Now that literalism strikes me as peculiarly wonderful. And, in retrospect, it seems completely bound up in my enjoyment as a young boy of what was far and away my favourite Dahl title: Fantastic Mr Fox – a book that continues to colonize my consciousness, if in rather bastardized form.
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The Spell of Stout Angus

Robert Macfarlane on James Stout Angus, A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect

In a poem written near the end of his life, W. S. Graham imagined himself as a ‘wordy ghost’, ‘floating across the frozen tundra / of the lexicon and the dictionary’. Like Graham – like many people – I am also a ‘wordy ghost’, who loves haunting the pages of lexicons, dictionaries and glossaries. Unlike Graham I find the pages of such books to be not ‘frozen tundra’, sterile and barren – but fabulous forests, alive with delving word-roots and spreading canopies of connotation.
20170612161824 Father's Day Presents Slightly Foxed Header

There was this cock-sparrow, my father . . .

In V. S. Pritchett’s wonderful memoir of his childhood and youth, A Cab at the Door, ‘VSP’, as his friends called him, grew up in the shadow of a father whom his own son, our regular contributor Oliver, describes as very like Dickens’s Mr Micawber – expansive, extravagant, insanely optimistic, always certain that ‘something would turn up’. Usually it didn’t – hence the ‘cab at the door’, waiting to bear the family quietly away from another clutch of creditors . . .
20170609145045 Slightly Foxed Paperback V. S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door

Avid to Live and Learn

Anne Boston on V. S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door

I shall always be grateful to A Cab at the Door. I read most of it one Sunday evening in a Victoria line tube train which was stuck for two hours outside King’s Cross station. The train lights dimmed and instead of the Blitz spirit a sullen, twitchy silence set in. I was spectacularly lucky in my companion. The sheer vigour of V. S. Pritchett’s writing and his benign, shrewd storyteller’s voice kept me suspended in his Edwardian boyhood until ‘the juice’, as the panic-stricken driver called it, came back on and we trundled away at last.
20170802174732 Rosalind Bliss, Crocuses - Issue 33

Crocuses

Rosalind Bliss

‘When you see your Crocuses wide open in flower sally forth with a stick of sealing-wax or the amber mouthpiece of an old pipe in your hand . . . Rub whichever of the two unusual accompaniments of a garden stroll you have chosen, on your coat-sleeve if it be woollen, and hold the rubbed portion as soon as possible after ceasing rubbing near the anthers of an open Crocus, and you will find the electricity thereby generated will cause the pollen grains to fly up to the electrified object, and, what is more, to stick there, but so lightly that directly they are rubbed against the stigma of another Crocus they will leave the amber and be left where you, and Nature before you, intended them to be.’ Essential instructions from E. A. Bowles . . . if you were wondering how to pollinate crocuses. Ursula Buchan introduced us to the green-fingered Bowles in her article on My Garden in Spring, which was featured in Issue 33 of Slightly Foxed and was illustrated by this woodcut from Rosalind Bliss.
20170601163140 John Watson-Slightly Foxed Issue 54 From the Editors Illustration

Slightly Foxed Issue 54: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

The trees are in full deep green leaf now, making a small oasis of Hoxton Square, while not fifty yards away the traffic roars past along Old Street. New regulations to cut down air pollution in London are on the way we learn, but now the fumes hang heavily in the summer air as we make for the office, dodging people coming in the other direction who seem to be talking to themselves but are actually on their mobile phones. As Jane Austen’s great hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse observes, ‘Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.’ For many of us these days it’s a hurrying, worrying world . . .
20170531144937 Strawberries, Simon Brett

Strawberries

Simon Brett

‘Strawberries, and only strawberries, could now be thought or spoken of. “The best fruit in England — every body’s favourite — always wholesome. — These the finest beds and finest sorts. — Delightful to gather for one’s self — the only way of really enjoying them — delicious fruit — only too rich to be eaten much of — inferior to cherries — currants more refreshing — only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping — glaring sun . . .“’
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At Home with the Cazalets

Sarah Perry on Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Cazalet Chronicles

‘All happy families resemble one another,’ said Tolstoy, rather sweepingly, ‘but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ The Anna Karenina principle has so long been taken for a truism one hesitates to disagree, but on reading Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles it occurred to me that there’s no such thing as a happy family – how could there be? – and that if there were, it would be a most unsatisfactory subject for a novel.
20170510165143 Geri Waddington, Peacock Garden

Peacock Garden

Geri Waddington

‘Swift knows about containment and spillage. It’s the basic dynamic of her garden. In summer the plants billow out over the clipped box hedges that mark the borders, and roses ramble profusely away from their arbours. In winter, with the disappearance of summer’s temporary improvisations, the straight lines of the garden are revealed, dark evergreen and brown.’ Alexandra Harris wrote of the joy of reading Katherine Swift’s The Morville Hours in Issue 50, accompanied by Geri Waddington’s wonderful woodcut.
20170501184343 The Hook of Holland, A Literary Hike

It was still a couple of hours till dawn when we dropped anchor in the Hook of Holland . . .

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Snow covered everything and the flakes blew in a slant across the cones of the lamps and confused the glowing discs that spaced out the untrodden quay. I hadn’t known that Rotterdam was a few miles inland. I was still the only passenger in the train and this solitary entry, under cover of night and hushed by snow, completed the illusion that I was slipping into Rotterdam, and into Europe, through a secret door . . .
20170426124214 Rosalind Bliss, Ducks and Daffodils

Ducks and Daffodils

Rosalind Bliss

Today’s woodcut first appeared on the contents page of Slightly Foxed Issue 33 in Spring 2012. Rosalind Bliss is a landscape artist based in the UK. She learned the rudiments of wood engraving from her father, the painter and art conservationist Douglas Percy Bliss, but went on to train as mural painter at Edinburgh College of Art. Later in life she turned again to engraving, working as a book illustrator and designing bookplates. She lives in Derbyshire, and is still producing paintings, wood engravings and murals, which she paints on to folding screens.
20170419165517 Issue 33 - Peter Reddick

A World of Shining Beauty

Peter Reddick

‘His descriptions are precise in every line, shaded so cleverly that the whole ninety pages work on you like a painting by Seurat. The dabs of colour are pretty enough – but stand back and there lies an entire landscape . . .’ wrote Gee Williams in A World of Shining Beauty, an article on John Masefield’s 1966 memoir Grace before Ploughing from Slightly Foxed, Issue 33. While there may not be dabs of colour in this week’s wood engraving, Peter Reddick has beautifully captured this rural landscape of rolling hills and spring meadows.
20161102115420 Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions, Plain Foxed Edition

Old Girls and Very Old Girls

Nicola Shulman, Preface to Ysenda Maxtone Graham Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939-1979

I went to a girls’ boarding-school in 1972. It was only for an afternoon. I’d been staying with a friend for half-term and we stopped on our way into London to drop her older sister back at school. I can’t remember which it was. Wycombe Abbey? Cobham Hall? Or Benenden, then of matchless fame for the education of Princess Anne? Though I’d never actually been inside a boarding-school, I knew all about them from books like Third Form at Malory Towers by the evidence-based historian, as I supposed she was, Enid Blyton.
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The Captive Reader: ‘Every December, I attend an Old Girls reunion . . .’

The Captive Reader

‘Every December, I attend an Old Girls reunion and Christmas carol service for my old school. It’s a fun event and I always meet the most interesting women.
There’s the Olympian with stories about her time in Brazil this summer, the children’s book author who I adored growing up, the researchers doing amazing work in their labs, and the retirees who now travel the world after lives spent in law, medicine or academia. It’s a circle I take for granted much of the time but always appreciate reconnecting with around the holidays. It is also a chance to cuddle babies of younger alum while eating cookies with the school logo on them – a win-win, really . . .’
20160108150929 ‘Something nasty in the woodshed’, by Mark Handley

Poste-Freudian Therapy

Michele Hanson on Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

It is generally thought that Stella Gibbons was mocking Mary Webb’s Precious Bane when she wrote Cold Comfort Farm, but she was probably having a pop at all those purveyors of country hardship, sex, doom and slop, Hardy and Lawrence included. One can easily tire of the lush, dripping, thrusting, tragic, moist, fecund countryside, and long for a brisk young woman from the tough pavements of town like Flora Poste to come along and tidy things up a bit . . .
20160805163248 Anthony Rhodes, Sword of Bone, Slightly Foxed Editions

Hanging Out on the Maginot Line

Michael Barber, Preface to Anthony Rhodes, Sword of Bone

In 1989 I was commissioned to write and present a programme about the Phoney War for BBC Radio 4. My research took me to the Imperial War Museum’s sound archives and the testimony of a Dunkirk veteran called Anthony Rhodes, who was commissioned into the Royal Engineers shortly before Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939. At that stage I’d no idea Rhodes had written a book about his experiences, but what he had to say on tape was exemplary . . .
20160902123703 From the Editors, Slightly Foxed Issue 51, Autumn 2016

Slightly Foxed Issue 51: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

After the events of the past few months, we must admit that, though extremely cheerful and optimistic, we’re also feeling a bit ruminative here in the office. Somehow the timeless and civilizing things we hope Slightly Foxed stands for seem more important than ever at a moment of change like this. We hope, anyway, that with the arrival of this autumn issue you can relax, draw the curtains – actual or metaphorical – and, as one of our American readers recently described it, ‘breathe a sigh of relief and slip into a world of thoughtfulness and good humor’.
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Slightly Foxed Issue 50: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

We had quite a celebration for our tenth anniversary in 2014 and now this summer we’ve reached what feels to us like another significant milestone – our 50th issue. You could say Slightly Foxed has reached middle age, but it still has a spring in its step and we enjoy putting it together as much now as we did when four of us sat round the kitchen table (one of us holding a baby who is now at secondary school) and planned the first issue . . .
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Happy Ever After

Daisy Hay on Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters

The Young Visiters was published in 1919 but written in 1890, when its author was 9. It appeared with a Preface by J. M. Barrie and with the manuscript’s many spelling mistakes faithfully reproduced. Within two years it had sold 230,000 copies, given rise to a stage play, and caused a rumpus in literary London. It has never been out of print since. This is an exceptional record for a slight work. Why was The Young Visiters so popular and why does it endure?
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Cover Artist: Issue 52, Mark Hearld, ‘Papercut Foxes’

Born in 1974, Mark Hearld studied illustration at Glasgow School of Art and then completed an MA in Natural History Illustration at the Royal College of Art. Taking his inspiration from the flora and fauna of the British countryside, he works across a number of mediums, producing limited-edition lithographic and linocut prints, paintings, collages and hand-painted ceramics. He has completed commissions for Faber & Faber, Tate Museums and Walker Books. In 2012 Merrell Books published Mark Hearld’s Work Book – the first book devoted to Mark’s work.
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Cover Artist: Issue 51, Olivia Lomenech Gill, ‘Vasalisa’s Garden’

Olivia is a professional artist. In recent years she has also worked on illustration after being commissioned to design and illustrate a book for Michael and Clare Morpurgo with Templar Publishing. This was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal in 2014 and nominated for the International Biennale of Illustration in Bratislava. Olivia lives and works in Northumberland, with her husband, a paper conservator, with whom she shares a dedicated print and conservation studio.
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Kindred Spirits

Liz Robinson on Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Do you treasure ancient paperbacks, spines gone, pages browning, brittle and crumbling, held together (or not quite) with perished elastic bands, simply because you also treasure the memories they evoke as much by their physical appearance as by their contents?

Do you treasure ancient paperbacks, spines gone, pages browning, brittle and crumbling, held together (or not quite) with perished elastic bands, simply because you also treasure the memories they evoke as much by their physical appearance as by their contents? . . .
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An unchanging ritual . . .

Ted Walker, The High Path

When he came home of an evening, we went through an unchanging ritual. Hanging on the gate, I could tell the shape of him as he cruised the last half-mile along the Brighton Road on the Ariel. Just our side of Chandler’s Corner he would switch off the petrol for the sake of economy and freewheel silently the rest of the way, having judged his impetus so exactly that the merest touch of the brakes would halt him after the front wheel bumped over the kerb. The bike would be wheeled into the outhouse, suddenly full of the stirring odour of hot oil and the clicking of cooling metal. And then, in the kitchen, even had I been blindfolded, I could have recognised him; for he brought into the house an entire anthology of smells I associated with nobody else . . .

20150901173006 SLIGHTLY FOXED EDITIONS No. 31 THE HOUSE OF ELRIG Gavin Maxwell

Mowgli with a Gun

Galen O'Hanlon, Preface to Gavin Maxwell, The House of Elrig

A few months before his thirteenth birthday, the young and miserable Gavin Maxwell crept out of St Wulfric’s prep school to send a ‘thoroughly hysterical’ letter to his mother. At the end of it he wrote, ‘For God’s sake take me away from this awful place.’ She answered his plea, and he was whisked away in the middle of the Spring term, ‘a quaking jelly of misery and self-pity’. He went straight home, to the House of Elrig – the house he grew up in on the edge of the vast Monreith estate in Galloway, surrounded by woods and peat bogs and heather. I was also a quaking jelly at school. I would long for the holidays, when we would pack up and drive to Scotland, to be dragged through ever thicker rain in search of ever rarer birds. My friends saw the sun in August. I saw the Shetland wren. So I find Maxwell’s books deeply comforting: none more so than The House of Elrig (1965), which describes in lucid detail the impossible social awkwardness of school, and the irresistible freedom of the natural world . . .
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Curiouser and Curiouser

Brandon Robshaw on Robert Aickman

All of Aickman’s tales (he wrote 48 in all) include some kind of supernatural element. ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal’ is a vampire story, ‘Ringing the Changes’ is a zombie story, others feature ghostly visitants of various kinds. But that in itself is not what is strange about them. The characters are strange. The events are strange. The scenarios are strange. It’s hard to convey the special, unsettling atmosphere of Aickman’s work to anyone who isn’t acquainted with it; but let me try . . .
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Surprised by Joy

Jonathan Law on The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner

It’s always strange to think how easily you might not have met that someone: a bus that arrived on time, or a last drink at the bar, and it might all have been quite different. Our meetings with books can be equally subject to fluke. I was in the queue at Barter Books in Alnwick, a clutch of holiday reading under my arm, when for no reason at all I picked up a green Virago paperback: The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Slightly Foxed Issue 47: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

It’s hard to believe autumn is here already. But the days are shortening, the air is growing brisker, and gradually the city is coming to life again as people trickle back after the long summer break. London is back in business, and it’s all go here in the Slightly Foxed office, with the latest of the Slightly Foxed Editions and Slightly Foxed Cubs arriving from the printers, and some new projects afoot.
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Nicholas Carey

Ronald Welch

New this autumn in the Slightly Foxed Cubs series.

It is 1853, and on holiday in Italy, Captain Nicholas Carey is persuaded by his impulsive cousin Andrew to help three Italian revolutionaries avoid capture and escape the Papal States. After returning to England, Nicholas runs his cousin to earth in Paris, where he is still involved with the revolutionaries, and the two foil an assassination attempt on the Emperor, Napoleon III. More . . .


Foxed
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The House of Elrig

Gavin Maxwell

New this autumn: Slightly Foxed Edition No. 31

The writer and naturalist Gavin Maxwell is best known for Ring of Bright Water, his moving account of raising otters on the remote west coast of Scotland – undoubtedly one of the greatest nature books ever written. In his childhood memoir The House of Elrig he describes, with the same lyrical power that made that earlier book a classic, how it all began. More . . .


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Substances & Shadows

September News from Slightly Foxed

It’s hard to believe autumn is here already. But the days are shortening, the air is growing brisker, and gradually the city is coming to life again as people trickle back after the long summer break. The autumn issue should now have arrived with subscribers near and far and we do hope you’re all enjoying it. We so enjoy the flurry of interaction with readers that comes in the wake of the new issue so if you have any thoughts or comments (good or bad) please do write in . . .

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A red-letter day in my literary world . . .

Andy Childs, Bookcomber Blog

The first week of September contains a red-letter day in my literary world, as does the beginning of December, March, and June. Four times a year the new edition of Slightly Foxed drops through the letter box and the rest of that particular day is given over to delving in and out of its 96 luxurious cream pages and making a list of out-of-print books that I never before knew existed but which I now MUST READ.

Issue number 47, Autumn 2015, which arrived last week is no exception . . .

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‘It will remind you of what it really means to be a reader . . .’

The Emerald City Book Review

‘What makes Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly so great? As I perused the latest issue, I realized that in many ways it’s exactly what I wish my blog to be, and what I appreciate about other blogs. Each issue contains around a dozen and a half essays in which readers of many stripes celebrate books that have moved, enlightened, impressed, or astonished them. The selection of titles is wonderfully eclectic, blithely leaping over barriers of genre, subject matter, language, geography, target age, and publication date . . .

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‘Quarterlies that may make you begin to drop names like Thucydides and Thoreau with aplomb . . .’

We were already delighted when the McLean & Eakin bookshop in Petoskey, Michigan started stocking Slightly Foxed and now, with this glowing recommendation from bookseller Julie, we’re even happier!

‘S.F. is published in the U.K. It is of the perfect size for reading in a cramped fisherman’s tent, train or a comfortably squashy bed. The lay-out is stylish and the small magazine has a lovely tactile quality. The illustrations are wonderfully clever . .
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Bookshop of the Quarter: Spring 2016

We’ve had a soft spot for Topping & Company, Bath since it opened in 2007 with an outstanding team of booksellers including Saber Khan and Kathleen Smith. Kathleen was a founding member of Slightly Foxed and has taken her unique blend of energy and creativity to run a vibrant series of events for Topping & Co. Kathleen also happens to be married to one of our favourite book designers and illustrators – the talented James Nunn who created many of the foxes that adorn the covers of our quarterly.
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A Literary Love Affair

Maggie Fergusson, Preface to Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

I thought I could never feel fond of Charing Cross Road. In 1988, when I was 23, I spent a miserable three months there doing a ‘Sight and Sound’ typing course on the bleak first floor of a building next to the Garrick Theatre. Secretarial instruction was delivered over headphones to classrooms full of women and as I tried to follow the disembodied tutorials my fingers kept slipping and jamming between the keys of a hefty, black manual typewriter.

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Evasions and Deceits

Peter Parker, Preface to Diana Petre, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley

Among the small horde of papers Diana Petre left me as her literary executor when she died in 2001 was a folder labelled: ‘Excuses. Lies. Evasions. Deceits.’ I thought at first that it might contain further notes about her mother, whose unhappy story is so brilliantly told in The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley and whose attempts to hold on to her many secrets involved all these ploys. In fact, it merely contained material Diana had collected for an anthology she once thought of compiling about the ways in which people get out of awkward or unwanted social engagements . . .
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Slightly Foxed Issue 48: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

By now most of us have probably begun the often rather agonized run-up to Christmas – the worry about what to buy for whom and where to find it. For Slightly Foxed readers, we suspect books are likely to feature somewhere in that list. Quite recently we read a piece by The Times columnist Jenni Russell bemoaning the fact that so many disappointing books by well-known writers are ludicrously overpromoted these days. Publishing, she wrote, ‘doesn’t prioritize what’s good, it prioritizes what’s new’.

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Slightly Foxed Issue 49: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

As everyone who lives here knows, spring in London doesn’t just signal daffodils in window boxes and budding trees in squares. It signals building projects. The whole city seems to be in a state of upheaval – ‘streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up . . . piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks’. That sounds like today, but in fact it’s Dickens in Dombey and Son describing the coming of the railway to Camden Town. London is forever changing and it’s certainly doing so now around the Slightly Foxed office in Hoxton Square – still fortunately a small haven of quiet, though only a few minutes’ walk from the gleaming office blocks of the new ‘Tech City’ rising around Old Street tube station . . .
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An Index to Slightly Foxed

We’re in the process of adding profiles of all our contributors to the noticeboard. Meantime, follow this link for an index to Issues 1-55 of the quarterly: An Index to Slightly Foxed


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The Sadness of Mrs Bridge

William Palmer on Evan S. Connell, Mrs Bridge

Mrs-Bridge---9780141198651

As a fan of early jazz, I’ve read a great deal about Kansas City as it was in the 1930s. A most attractive place it seems in retrospect, of twenty-four-hour drinking and gambling, to the accompaniment of wonderful music provided by young, prodigiously talented and mostly black instrumentalists and singers; a wide-open city ruled over by a corrupt mayor, Boss Pendergast, whose main duty seems to have been to keep the good times rolling . . .
20160420123126 Slightly Foxed Editions: Gerald Durrell, MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS

The Strawberry-Pink Villa

Gerald Durrell, My Family & Other Animals

The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuchsia hedges, had the flowerbeds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake’s head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles and circles, all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild.

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Paradise Regained

Simon Barnes, Preface to Gerald Durrell, My Family & Other Animals

Durrell

Every paradise is lost. That’s kind of the point. Loss is the diagnostic feature of every paradise ever lived or imagined. But for five miraculous years and 120,000 miraculous words Gerald Durrell sustained a vision of paradise with joy in every day and every page. Most evocations of paradise dwell on the eventual loss: not here. My Family and Other Animals is a tale of uninterrupted delight . . .

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Wilder Shores

Richard Mabey on Lesley Blanch, Round the World in Eighty Dishes

I slipped into the world of Lesley Blanch’s swashbuckling cookbook, Round the World in Eighty Dishes (1955), before I’d even heard of it. It was the early ’60s, and I was on my first visit to Paris with friends from university. The city was sizzling in a July heatwave, and our host took us to an Arab quarter near St Michel, where we saw something extraordinary to our English eyes: people not just eating in the street but cooking in it.
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At Home with the Pewters

Antony Wood on George & Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody

I’m bound to admit that some of the experiences, and also, for heavens’ sake, the attitudes of the ‘pathetic ass who records his trivial life’ (as William Emrys Williams put it in his introduction to the Penguin edition of 1945), seem embarrassingly close to my own. Mr Pooter may have lived more than a hundred years ago – just up the road from where I live now, as it happens, in a house, er, rather similar to mine – but his psychology is timeless.
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Our readers write . . .

After reading @M_Z_Harrison – top-notch – on Gilbert White in @FoxedQuarterly I’ve spent the wknd dug into Selborne pic.twitter.com/Sy470cTK8J — Laura Freeman (@LauraSFreeman) November 30, 2015


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There was one day that fell in early December, more exciting than Christmas itself . . .

John Moore, Portrait of Elmbury

Always on this occasion my father’s firm provided sandwiches and drinks for all comers: dealers, smallholders, cowmen, shepherds, drovers. (The more substantial farmers were entertained to luncheon at the Swan.) Great were the preparations on the day before the market. Enormous joints sizzled in Old Cookie’s oven; baskets of loaves lay everywhere about the kitchen, huge pats of yellow butter, tongues, sausages, pasties. Maids were busy all day cutting sandwiches, which were piled on dishes and covered with napkins. There was an air of bustle and festivity all over the house . . .
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‘ . . . it couldn’t be more bookish if it tried.’

Guardian

‘For those bibliophiles who yearn for a whiff of an era when a chap wanting something bound in leather on the Charing Cross Road looked to Marks & Co., not Ann Summers, Slightly Foxed will come as manna from heaven . . . it couldn’t be more bookish if it tried.’ Guardian


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Most Pressing Problems

The winter quarter is almost upon us . . . Issue 48 has been printed, sewn and trimmed and our printers in Yorkshire now have the mammoth task of packaging up all our subscribers’ copies to be sent out towards the end of next week. Meanwhile, here in Hoxton Square, each day brings a fresh delivery of parcels to keep the office foxes on their toes. Thankfully all the lugging of boxes upstairs, sprinting for the phone, stretching to the top shelves for slipcases, wrestling with cardboard and lunging for the tape gun means we never feel too bad about having just one more mince pie, and it’s always worth it when at last we open up the brown paper parcels and glimpse the new issue’s artwork or the binding cloth on the latest edition for the first time . . .
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Bookshop of the Quarter: Summer 2016

Anna Kirk

Wenlock Books has been the beating heart of the high street in the ancient market town of Much Wenlock since 1987. Loved by locals and visitors alike, customers include regulars from South Africa, France, the USA and New Zealand, as well as UK customers from Manchester, Birmingham, London and Edinburgh. Some visit every year, some pop in two or three times a week: the bookshop has a large family! At the head of this family is shop owner and bookseller Anna Dreda, and we happily quizzed her on life at Wenlock Books.
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May News from Slightly Foxed

Summer is almost upon us at Slightly Foxed. The printers in Yorkshire and office foxes in Hoxton are knee-deep in boxes of crisp creamy quarterlies, newly minted books and mounds of bubble-wrap and packing tape in preparation for the dispatch of the summer issue of the quarterly. Subscribers can look forward to receiving it towards the end of the first week of June, and with it be transported to Mandalay with Justin Marozzi, across the channel with Joanna Kavenna, into the world of Whigs with Michael Holroyd, to Nowhere with Travis Elborough . . . but we mustn’t give too much away!
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Our readers write . . .

A. Smout, Isle of Wight

‘I have just renewed my subscription online and had completely forgotten to do so earlier. Quite how I forgot a publication which gives me as much pleasure as Slightly Foxed is beyond me. Not only do I read each copy cover to cover when it arrives, I keep all the past issues and regularly delve into them. When my daughters were teenagers, the highest accolade they ever bestowed was to call something “utter genius”. You certainly are – thank you.’
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Famous People’s Foxes

Carol Ann Duffy

As Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy has written about contemporary events and issues and refused to be tied down to the traditional Royal milestones. Her drawing is also pleasingly free and original. Here is a fox who knows all the angles, and yet, at…


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Our readers write . . .

J. Petterson, Canada

‘I recently received my copy of Christabel Bielenberg’s The Past Is Myself and I must say it is even more lovely a thing than I’d anticipated. Reading it, with its fine paper and its perfect size, slows me down in the very best way. Smith Settle have done a magnificent job in its production, and the choice of Bielenberg’s memoir is really inspired as it requires quiet contemplation and a slow pace to take in the import of the years the author so sensitively describes. You have brought a slice of slowness (a very good thing) into my life in the form of this beautiful edition.’
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Our readers write . . .

C. O'Dell, Cork

‘Thank you for the latest Edition, I am very pleased that you have included Gerry Durrell’s book in your series. I was cameraman on several of Gerry and Lee’s TV documentary series and got to know them well. They were both great company and fun to work with, and I visited them at the zoo in Jersey several times. I’m enclosing a copy of the flyleaf of one of their books, with the appropriate inscription – the grocer’s apostrophe is a bit of a worry, though! Keep up the good work.’
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‘Pocket-sized little chunks of perfection’

Erik Heywood, Book/Shop

‘A memoir written in the late 1920s and recently republished in the beautiful Slightly Foxed Paperback series. The book tells of Bell’s move, at 20 years old, from bohemian Battersea to a small farm in Suffolk. Bell is a favourite of mine, and his nature writing is immediately transporting. It doesn’t hurt, either, that the Slightly Foxed Paperbacks, pocket-sized little chunks of perfection, are the most beautifully made paperbacks I’ve ever had the pleasure to own. They’re made by a traditional small press in Yorkshire to standards that make reading on a device seem like the most depressing possible compromise.’ On Adrian Bell’s Corduroy


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‘A joy in itself . . .’

House & Garden

‘A  joy in itself  –  and it also publishes attractive, limited-edition, cloth-bound pocket hardbacks that will appeal to traditionalists’ 


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‘Sparky and independent’

The Times


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‘A lovely production . . . it contains many riches’ 

The Bookseller


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Our readers write . . .

BBC Radio 4 Today

‘Absolutely beautifully produced.’


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‘Like a breath of fresh air’

Irish Times


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‘Brilliant . . . a great present for those who love books and those who live abroad’

Financial Times


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‘A quarterly box of delights – always something unexpected to excite the taste buds of the bookish. I know it’s planned, but it feels fortuitous and that’s quite an art’ 

Paul Routledge, Independent


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‘Packed with anecdotes, reminiscences and essays about books, writers and the trade. If you love books you’ll love Slightly Foxed’

Time Out


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‘Fondling its delightfully crisp, cream pages you can almost feel corduroy patches sprouting from your elbows’

Travis Elborough, Guardian


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‘A great present for someone who likes books’

Miles Kington, Independent

‘Slightly Foxed is a handsome handful of thick creaminess, always with lovely covers, and would make a great present for someone who likes books, and for who you can never think of a remotely suitable present. The magazine is rather like that voice you always hope to hear behind you in old bookshops . . . Ah now that’s an interesting one’


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‘Strike a blow for good reading’

Bookslut

‘Slightly Foxed offers a chance to discover about eighty books a year that most of us have never heard of but all of us will wonder about. Strike a blow for good reading everywhere and order a sample issue. It’s all about books, really good books . . . I couldn’t be happier to have found this magazine’


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‘A wonderful publication’

The Author

‘. . . at once unpretentious and lively, edifying and fun’


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‘A heartfelt celebration of writing that has stood the test of time’

Gaby Wood, Telegraph

‘Subscribers are so happy they exist that they occasionally drop in to the kitchen headquarters – sometimes they bring marmalade; at Christmas, they send cash so the staff can all go out for a drink. And once in a while, a contented reader will write to the dog’


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Our readers write . . .

A. Kennedy, Australia

‘I received a sub for my birthday last year and have just renewed for three years. I can’t tell you how much I love SF. A little companion to take for reading on trains, waiting in queues or in the afternoon as the sun goes down. Reconfirms my view that England has the greatest collection of wonderfully eccentric over-educated people who every quarter demonstrate the benefits of a classical education. Only problem is you sending me broke as when I see mention of a book I haven’t heard of I get on the second hand book sites searching for it. Alas I find them and then buy them . . .’
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C. S. Forrester Society

C. S. Forester is one of the great writers of the twentieth-century. His novels are distinguished by the famous Hornblower stories, and by ‘African Queen’ which was made into the famous film. The C. S. Forester Society was established in 1998 to celebrate and promote the enjoyment of Forester’s literary works.

www.csforester.wordpress.com


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The John Betjeman Society

The Betjeman Society was established in 1988 to advance the appreciation of the work of the poet, writer, broadcaster and conservationist Sir John Betjeman (1906-84).

www.betjemansociety.com


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Our readers write . . .

R. Barratt, USA

‘A good London friend who was visiting in New York recently, and I, were commiserating about the current black hole in the world of books, publishing and bookstores. So he felt I was ready for Slightly Foxed which I had never heard about! I feel I am coming out of my mourning. I just wish the English Pound/US Dollar was more friendly and then I would purchase all the back copies. I have already alerted friends in South Africa and family in Australia that you exist – we can’t believe we did not know of your existence.’
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Our readers write . . .

M. Wallis, Wolverhampton

‘Excellent and oozing quality . . . a beautiful format and a pleasure to hold. Each of the articles I’ve read is impeccably written (and proofread) and I suspect one would search in vain to spot either a spelling error or a grammatical solecism. Indeed a careful reading of SF would certainly repay any student of A-level English. This cannot be said of too many publications, including the “quality” newspapers.’