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20180620111300 Kathleen Lindsley - Robert Macfarlane

Cooling off – Dunvegan

Kathleen Lindsley

‘Reading Haldane has transformed the way I understand the Highlands. He taught me how to follow on foot the routes of the drove roads, and to look for the patches of open ground that would have been the “stances” of the drovers: the resting-places, close to water and on level ground, where the men could sleep and the livestock could graze. And he introduced me to the drovers themselves: these hard men, the long-distance lorry-drivers of their day, accustomed to the boredoms and rigours of their journeys, and equipped with internalized sat-navs of astonishing accuracy. They navigated not from maps but from memories, stories and gossip . . .’
20180611101234 June News from Slightly Foxed: Denis Constanduros, Noises and Places, Father's Day Gifts

June News: Noises and Places

Summer is now in full swing here at Slightly Foxed. The new issue of the quarterly has travelled far and wide to subscribers all over the globe, and whether you too are off to far-flung places this summer, or simply staying at home, we hope you’ll find it good company.

In this month’s newsletter we’re celebrating fathers and grandfathers with Denis Constanduros’s charming memoirs, My Grandfather and Father, Dear Father, published together for the first time as our 20th Slightly Foxed Edition. Do read on for an extract from this charming book, and a few suggestions for presents for this coming Father’s Day or, indeed, for any occasion.
20180529112342 May News from Slightly Foxed: John Moore & a kind of Englishness

May News: A kind of Englishness

Greetings once more from No. 53 Hoxton Square. The turn of the quarter is almost upon us and we have the pressing – and cheering – business of good reading to report. The cream pages of the summer issue of Slightly Foxed, No. 58: ‘A Snatch of Morning’, have rolled off the printing presses up at Smith Settle, been pressed, nipped, trimmed, sewn and bound, and then lovingly stuffed into handsome (and ecologically friendly) sturdy brown envelopes and bundled into postbags to begin their journey around the world . . . And we’re off to Brensham with our 42nd Slightly Foxed Edition, The Blue Field, and a snippet of Sarah Perry’s lovely preface by way of introduction.
20180523135123 Anne Hayward Sarah Perry Article John Moore The Blue Field

Sprouts and Parsnip Wine

Sarah Perry on John Moore, The Blue Field

Early one morning, late in July, the villagers of ‘crack-brained Brensham’ woke to a remarkable spectacle. There amid the customary colours of furze and wheat was a seven-acre field that ‘had suddenly become tinctured with the colour of Mediterranean skies’. Nothing like it had ever happened before, so that the villagers caught their breath at the sight of this miracle: a great, vivid patch of cerulean ‘so clear and pure that it made one think of eyes or skies’ . . .
20180514170116 Divine Spark. Slightly Foxed magazine archives: Muriel Spark

Divine Spark

Emma Hogan on Muriel Spark

I first came across Spark when working in a little second-hand bookshop off the Charing Cross Road. A battered tome of her selected works was on sale in the outside pile, desolately stationed there to be picked over by tourists and dampened by rain. Not having much to do (the shop closed a month later, not necessarily because I’d worked there) I started reading one afternoon, and was hooked. For while Muriel Spark makes you laugh out loud, she also makes you think – she must, I feel, have been a formidable dinner-party companion, quietly sitting there with her razor-sharp tongue . . .

20180514155938 Laura, Louisa and Me. Slightly Foxed: Daisy Hay on Childhood Reading

Laura, Louisa and Me

Daisy Hay on her childhood reading

The Child that Books Built is the title of a memoir by Francis Spufford which explores the impact of books read in childhood by interspersing an account of Spufford’s own reading with excursions into history, philosophy and psychology. It beautifully articulates the formative nature of childhood literary exploration. ‘The words we take into ourselves help to shape us,’ Spufford writes. ‘They help form the questions we think are worth asking; they shift around the boundaries of the sayable inside us . . . They build and stretch and build again the chambers of our imagination.’
20180510150858 Slightly Foxed Issue 16: Strangely Like Real Life, Grant McIntyre on Anthony Powell

Strangely Like Real Life

Grant McIntyre on Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

My own prime favourite is Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time: panoramic, sharply observed, farcical, ironic, yet shot through with what Kingsley Amis called an endlessly inquisitive melancholy. We shadow the narrator Nick Jenkins from the callow half-understanding of youth, in the Twenties, through the drastic remaking of lives and relationships by war, to late middle age in the heady Sixties and Seventies – a whole new age of absurdity against which the novel’s various endgames are played out . . .
20180423101212 Slightly Foxed April News: The Call of the Sea

April News: The Call of the Sea

Inspired by the call of the sea, for this week’s newsletter we dived into the Slightly Foxed archives and fished around for something suitably watery. We floated past some very good pieces on Swallows and Amazons (Issue 18), Patrick O’Brian (Issues 40, 42, 44) and The Compleat Angler (Issue 54), but we were looking for something a little more unusual. A few more kicks and there it was: nineteenth-century fisherman on the east coast of Scotland, a lost love and plenty of adventure. So off we go to sea, with Galen O’Hanlon on Neil M. Gunn’s The Silver Darlings.
20180329173725 That unsettling misunderstanding over the eggs. A Late Beginner

March News: That unsettling misunderstanding over the eggs

For this newsletter we’re travelling to Cairo with a young Priscilla Napier to investigate an unsettling egg-related incident in an extract from A Late Beginner, introduced by Penelope Lively whose latest memoir – Life in the Garden – is one of our favourite books published in recent months. Please read on for an extract and, to follow, a few spring reading ideas, some missives from readers and new subscriber offers from Foxed Friends.
20180328122733 Ian Stephens - Pigs

Pigs

Ian Stephens

‘“Those are good pigs,” he said, “aren’t they?”
If he had said they were bad pigs I should have agreed with him equally. Their shape meant nothing to me.
“Good length,” he explained, “broad in the back and not too much head.”
I strove to see it, but no person can appreciate the points of a pig till he has dwelt long with them.
Looking back, I cannot tell at what point I began to know a good pig from a bad one. The farmer’s eye is as subtle as the artist’s.’
20180425120041 Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings, Slightly Foxed Shop

The Call of the Sea

Galen O’Hanlon on Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings

It’s a wonderful thing when a book so fires the imagination that it becomes more real than the world around you, when the mind is totally absorbed, the page dissolves, and you begin to exist differently. It was mainly a thing of long childhood summers, when I was a musketeer, then a Viking, a wizard, a centaur – once even a quickfooted warrior mouse. Sadly it stopped in adolescence, when these things weren’t done . . .
20180313114430 Slightly Foxed Jobs

Join the Slightly Foxed team

Slightly Foxed is looking for a friendly, enthusiastic person to help in the Hoxton office on a part-time basis with packing orders, gift-wrapping books and subscriptions, stock management and general day-to-day administration of orders.

We need a lively, well-organized person who genuinely takes satisfaction in preparing and dispatching items, enjoys gift-wrapping, and is happy to hand-write cards and messages to be sent with items. Slightly Foxed prides itself on its personal, friendly and high-end service, which is something that our readers love so, in this role, you’ll be a very important part of the team.
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‘This was an exceptional shortlist . . .’

Sam Leith, The Spectator

‘I had the privilege – alongside the wise and learned Caroline Moorehead and Ian Kelly – of helping judge this year’s Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, which was last night awarded to Edmund Gordon for his superb The Invention of Angela Carter . . . This was an exceptional shortlist, in which every book showed not only thorough knowledge of its subject but deep and sympathetic understanding. And from the Tudor court, to the battlefields of the first world war, from a busy obs/gynae ward on the NHS to the august halls of the National Gallery, from a book-lined study to a Japanese love-hotel, we were thoroughly immersed in the worlds these books inhabit.’
20180308131309 News from Slightly Foxed: A beautiful mother who adored him

March News: A beautiful mother who adored him

Greetings from Hoxton Square where the new quarter’s usual delightful flurry of orders is keeping the office foxes on their toes. Ordinarily we send out a newsletter just once a month, so you may be wondering why you’ve now received two in fairly swift succession. Well, in last week’s missive we rashly promised we’d be in touch again soon with some further suggestions for Mothering Sunday presents. We suspect that most of you have been extremely well-organised and have already placed your orders by now, but we did promise so if you are in need of some last-minute ideas you’ll find a few suggestions in this newsletter . . .
20180301130725 March News from Slightly Foxed: Collar as Dawn. Back as Snowdrop.

February News: Collar as Dawn. Back as Snowdrop.

Meteorologically speaking, we are still deep in mid-winter, but here at Slightly Foxed the new quarter waits not for the weather, so we are delighted to announce that it is now, officially, spring. Thanks to the sterling work of Tracey and her team at Smith Settle printers in Yorkshire, the new issue of the quarterly: No. 57, ‘A Crowning Achievement’, is now on its way to readers all around the world. Whether you make the most of the inclement weather and curl up in a favourite chair to devour it immediately or wait for a fair day for some al fresco reading, we do hope you’ll enjoy its typically eclectic collection of good writing and good reading . . .
20180522121153 Cover illustration by Debbie George Debbie George has been a painter for over twenty years. Her work is a celebration of her passion for flowers and the objects with which she surrounds herself. She finds inspiration in many forms, ranging from ceramics and plants to books and wallpaper, textiles and landscape. Assembling flowers or objects within the foreground of a painting and setting them against a variety of backdrops, Debbie builds up layers of paint that create a wonderful luminosity and depth. For more of her work see www.debbiegeorge.co.uk.

Cover Artist: Issue 58, Debbie George, Forget me not

Debbie George has been a painter for over twenty years. Her work is a celebration of her passion for flowers and the objects with which she surrounds herself. She finds inspiration in many forms, ranging from ceramics and plants to books and wallpaper, textiles and landscape. Assembling flowers or objects within the foreground of a painting and setting them against a variety of backdrops, Debbie builds up layers of paint that create a wonderful luminosity and depth.
20180221124033 Miriam McGregor - Somerset Garden

Somerset Garden

‘She rises still. A region must be found unhaunted by birds, that else might profane the mystery. She rises still; and already the ill-assorted troop below are dwindling and falling asunder. The feeble, infirm, the aged, unwelcome, ill fed, who have flown from inactive or impoverished cities – these renounce the pursuit and disappear in the void. Only a small, indefatigable cluster remain, suspended in infinite opal. She summons her wings for one final effort; and now the chosen of incomprehensible forces has reached her, has seized her, and, bounding aloft with united impetus, the ascending spiral of their intertwined flight whirls for one second in the hostile madness of love.’
20171222171552 Susan Einzig - Maggie Fergusson, Tom’s Midnight Garden, When the Clock Struck Thirteen

When the Clock Struck Thirteen

Maggie Fergusson on Philippa Pearce, Tom’s Midnight Garden

A lot of the stories I loved most as a child involved doors. Aged about 4, I suppose, I passed through the small, latched door in the hillside, into Mrs Tiggywinkle’s flagged kitchen, filled with the ‘nice, hot, singey smell’ of ironing, busy and reassuring. A few years later came the doors into Narnia, the Secret Garden and Wonderland, Bilbo Baggins’s ‘perfectly round’ green door with its shiny yellow brass knob ‘in the exact middle’, the door into the Yellow Dwarf ’s home in the orange tree, and the dark door into Bluebeard’s bloody chamber . . .

But reading to my own children, the door I’ve been happiest to pass through again is the door into Tom’s Midnight Garden – a door one can only imagine because, unlike most of the others, it is never described.
20171221121946

Uncomfortable Truths

Diana Athill on W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

The literary editor, novelist, memoirist and lady of letters Diana Athill turns 100 today, and is still writing. To celebrate her birthday, we are delighted to share the article she wrote for Slightly Foxed in Issue 28, Winter 2010.

. . .

There is no book more haunting than W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. I would not advise anyone unfamiliar with his earlier books to make it their introduction to his work, because his decision to do away, in this one, with paragraphs, and the way in which the narrative unfolds, are disconcerting enough when first encountered to be off-putting. It is necessary to make an act of trust – to put yourself in his hands; and this may be a problem for anyone who has not yet learned to trust him by reading his wonderful The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo. I doubt whether I would have persisted beyond the first thirty-odd pages of Austerlitz if I hadn’t already learned that wherever Sebald led, I must follow him . . .

20171018165647 Judith Jaidinger - The Three Mothers

The Three Mothers

Judith Jaidinger

‘One image of a veiled woman was all net and nose. Then, by laying down carefully pared pieces of onion-skin tissue-paper behind the place where the impression would be made, Brian brought out and made visible the expression of traumatized, envious sympathy the artist had engraved into the wood in her depiction of the woman’s face. It slowly came alive at his touch – though Brian would pass the credit back to the artist who created the picture. I suppose he is right; but his contribution is closer to that of a concert pianist interpreting a score than that of an engineer.’
20170920161814 The Little Grey Men and Down The Bright Stream

‘It brought back to me all the magical delight that my mother and I shared . . .’

J.C.

‘I have just opened my newly delivered Slightly Foxed and gone straight to the article about The Little Grey Men and Down the Bright Stream. It has brought back to me all the magical delight that my mother and I shared in reading them together. We had no hollow oak on our land but how I longed to live in one. Such yearnings don’t quite go away! I have just ordered the pair from SF. (Books that is, not hollow oaks).’
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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

August News: 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.
20160906150813 ronald-welch1-13

‘Thank you once again for republishing these great books . . .’

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.’
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‘Here’s to good reading . . .’

E. Hanson, USA

‘I’m sorry to say that I never made it to your office in Hoxton Square while visiting London back in March, but I have purchased two of your wonderful Slightly Foxed editions. They are lovely and the quality is what I expected it would be. I plan on ordering more books in the near future. I was curious how you chose your titles to print and how many titles you plan to make in the future. I think 100 would be a nice number, maybe ambitious but maybe you have plans for more. Lucky for the rest of us. Thank you for making these lovely books and here’s to good reading.’ E. Hanson, USA
20170721172908 Holiday reading, Slightly Foxed

July News: 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 . . .
20170718122539

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 . . .

20170718121720

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.
20170627131401

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

June News: 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 . . .
20160705155547

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?
20161201111013 Cover illustration: Mark Hearld, ‘Papercut Foxes’, screen print

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 . . .


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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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‘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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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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‘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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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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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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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 1-57 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 . . .
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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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‘Top-notch . . .’

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

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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‘Utter genius. . .’

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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‘Even more lovely than I’d anticipated . . .’

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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‘Keep up the good work. . .’

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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‘Beautifully produced . . .’

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’