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What excellent company you are!

I have been devoted to your podcast for over a year; it could be improved only by being more frequent. Every book I have ordered from you has been a delight; nothing disappoints. I receive your emails with pleasure, and that’s saying a lot. Slightly Foxed is a source of content . . .

K. Nichols, Washington, USA

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Tawny Owl

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.

17th January 2017

The Captive Reader: ‘Every December, I attend an Old Girls reunion . . .’

‘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 . . .’

- The Captive Reader

From readers

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?

1st March 2013

Slightly Foxed Issue 37: From the Editors

We’re now comfortably settled at our new home in Hoxton Square which, being a proper office rather than part of a flat, is far more spacious and functional than Brewhouse Yard. We do miss the spectacular view we had there of London’s domes and towers rising against the sky behind St Paul’s, but we’re enjoying the edgy inner city feel of Hoxton with its little specialist bookshops, vegetarian restaurants and bicycles chained to the railings among the plane trees and scruffy city pigeons. Thank you so much, all of you who sent us good wishes for the move and appreciative Christmas cards. We were extremely touched to receive them.

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

10th January 2017

‘One of the most wonderful books I’ve ever read . . .’

‘I wanted to let you know that I ordered Portrait of Elmbury based on the review and excerpts in SF. I’ve just finished it and have to say that this was one of the most wonderful books I’ve ever read, so thank you for being the conduit to my discovery! I grew up on a farm in rural Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, which is a far cry from 1920s and 1930s rural England and yet . . .’

- M. Woledge, Australia

From readers

Aldeburgh Beach

Branwen Lucas explores the towns, villages and coast of Suffolk with Julian Tennyson’s Suffolk Scene, a ‘sparkling record of his love affair with this often neglected part of East Anglia’. Her article ‘Silly Suffolk’ appeared in Slightly Foxed Issue 23, and was illustrated by wonderful wood engravings of the county by Howard Phipps. This is the beach at Aldeburgh, Tennyson’s best-loved town.

‘Tennis!’ I was astounded . . .

'Lettice Spragg has promised to invite you to tennis one Sunday. I confided my worries to her and read aloud your father’s latest letter.’ ‘Tennis!’ I was astounded . . .

Daisies

These cheerful daisies adorned the contents page of Slightly Foxed Issue 38, Summer 2013. Ian Stephens was born in North Buckinghamshire in 1940. He studied illustration and lettering at Northampton School of Art and started engraving immediately on leaving . . .

5th January 2017

‘Best present ever . . .’

‘I can’t wait to receive the first magazine. I had a peek at the digital version and I already love it. Best present ever . . . ’

- E. Castellucci, Hove

From readers

Summer 2017 Launch Party

Slightly Foxed and Harris & Harris Books We celebrated the launch of our special limited edition of The Cherry Tree, the final book in Adrian Bell’s celebrated trilogy of Suffolk country life between the wars, at Harris & Harris Books in Clare on a sunny summer’s evening in July.

Under the Cherry Tree

This woodcut by C. F. Tunnicliffe illustrated Slightly Foxed Editor Hazel’s article on The Cherry Tree

Heylor, Shetland

Robert Macfarlane delights in dialect and explores the landscape of language in Slightly Foxed Issue 49, accompanied by Claire Dalby’s woodcut of Heylor, Shetland.

June News: The Word-Hoard – Love Letters to Our Land

At this time of year, the build-up of desket syndrome at SF HQ is increasingly problematic, and the prospect of escaping the city for a dose of the natural world becomes more appealing by the day. High up on our current wish list of excursions is a day out at The Word-Hoard exhibition at William Wordsworth’s childhood home in the Cumbrian town of Cockermouth . . .

Roman Wall

‘In clear and elegant prose he described how lanes and hedges, copses, farmsteads, fields and place names could tell the story of the past and explain the configuration of the present . . .'

Dashing Fox

Most Slightly Foxed readers, we suspect, have some irritating gaps on their bookshelves left by favourite titles lent and never returned. A personal bookplate is an elegant and practical way of solving the problem, and would make a very handsome present for a bookworm or provide an excellent incentive to do that sort-out of your own books that you’ve long had in mind. This fine fox by Sue Scullard is one of eight designs available.

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 . . .