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A friendship conducted through books | Notes from Slightly Foxed

A friendship conducted through books | Notes from Slightly Foxed

Greetings from all of us at Slightly Foxed. In light of the latest restrictions in the UK, we wanted to reassure you that we are able to safely dispatch books and goods. Please note that all orders will take a little longer to be dispatched than usual, and we are very grateful for your patience and continued support. In the spirit of celebrating bookish correspondence, we wanted to draw your attention to one of our well-loved Plain Foxed Editions, 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. The letters between Helene, a feisty, eccentric New York writer, and Frank Doel, a bookseller at Marks & Co. in London, reveal a growing friendship conducted through books.
22nd January 2021

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 22 January 2021

Lovely though Christmas is, I must admit I also enjoy January. There’s something very satisfying about taking down the Christmas tree, tidying the house, finishing all the leftovers in the larder, putting up a calendar for the new year, opening a fresh diary and generally taking stock before spring arrives. This year, during our third lockdown, these small routines seem more important than ever. There’s an austere beauty too in the winter landscape. The sheep have cropped the grass to reveal every dip and curve in the land, the bracken has died back and the trees, now without even their tattered autumn leaves, have become living sculptures of twisted branches reaching into the sky. The winter light, low as dusk approaches, transforms the landscape and spotlights here a ridge, there a cleft in the valley.
- Gail Pirkis & Steph Allen
From the editors
Last call for orders and seasonal reading from Slightly Foxed

Last call for orders and seasonal reading from Slightly Foxed

Warm wishes from Hoxton Square where Christmas cards from readers are cheering up the bookshelves, wrapping paper is running off rolls and post bags are filling up and weighing down the post van as we ready ourselves to close the office for Christmas next week. The final post of the year will leave the office on Monday afternoon (21 December). Please order as soon as possible to give us enough time to pack and post your goods out in time for Christmas. For delivery before the 25th (UK) we suggest you also select First Class or Special Delivery as your postal option on the website or over the phone. For any last minute presents, or for items to be posted outside the UK, you can order all goods on our website and have a printable gift card sent to you or directly to the gift recipient by email. Meantime we will leave you with a seasonal excerpt from Christopher Rush’s article on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, published in Slightly Foxed Issue 60, and we do hope you enjoy reading it.
Episode 27: Dr Wiener’s Library

Episode 27: Dr Wiener’s Library

Anthony Wells worked at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London for a decade. In this episode he leads the Slightly Foxed editors into the history of the library, which holds one of the most extensive archives on the Holocaust and the Nazi era. We travel to Germany, Amsterdam, New York and Tel Aviv, but it is people rather than places that the library remembers with its annals of personal stories. Dr Alfred Wiener, a German Jew who fought in the First World War, was one of the first to note the rise of the Nazi Party, and he began to assemble an archive of information in order to undermine their activities. From downfall by documentation in the Nuremberg Trial to a tracing service made up of millions of records, we learn how The Wiener Library ensures that those who disappeared are not forgotten.
37 minutes
‘Smashing little hardbacks’ | Slightly Foxed Editions

‘Smashing little hardbacks’ | Slightly Foxed Editions

Greetings from Slightly Foxed. Parcels and packages are flying out of Hoxton Square to readers at a great rate and, whether they are presents for a fellow bibliophile or bookish gems that have caught your eye this season, we do hope they bring much literary cheer. There’s still time for us to help with gifts for booklovers, and we’d like to draw your attention to our Slightly Foxed Editions – beautifully produced pocket hardbacks, just the right size to hold in the hand and with a ribbon marker to keep your place. Perfectly designed to curl up with, these reissues of classic memoirs are highly individual and absorbing reads. And, if you have missed out on a title or two from our series of limited-editions, our Plain Editions come in the same neat pocket format as the original SF Editions and will happily fill any gaps in your collection – as well as forming a delightful uniform series of their own, bound in duck-egg blue cloth. For those of you in need of a good book, do seize the chance to stock up now. We hope you enjoy browsing our bookshelves.
A Feast of Seasonal Treats | Slightly Foxed Readers’ Catalogue

A Feast of Seasonal Treats | Slightly Foxed Readers’ Catalogue

‘I continue to enjoy reading and rereading Slightly Foxed and the books bought from the catalogues. Feasts indeed!’ Warm wishes from SF HQ, where festive spirits are high and feasting is on the menu: sipping and supping, hearty spreads of good reading and groaning tables (or in this case parcels and post bags) of seasonal treats. Present ideas for booklovers are abundant here at Slightly Foxed, and this week we’re shining the spotlight on our picks from other publishers’ bookshelves alongside our own wares. Please scroll down for recommendations selected on a similar theme. Whether you’re in need of a few good books for yourself or as gifts for someone you’re fond of this season, we hope you’ll find these suggestions helpful.
22nd December 2020

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 22 December 2020

The first wave of Christmas cards has started to arrive: ‘Hope you’re staying safe’; ‘All quiet here – only one case in the village’. News of weddings postponed, of holidays cancelled, but also of new babies, of violin exams passed with distinction, of Zoom book groups and lockdown exercise sessions. The end of the kitchen table is piled with packs of Christmas cards still waiting to be sent, but this year there’s a terrible hitch. We can’t find our address book, which has our whole lives in it.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors

Bookshop of the Quarter: Winter 2020

This year, more than ever, has shown how important it is to support and champion local and independent bookshops. Although a grand tour of bookshops might not be possible right now, we look forward to the day when we can rummage through bookshelves and buy recommended reading from convivial booksellers around the country. In the meantime, it is our great pleasure to head north to Edinburgh and pay a virtual visit to the latest bookshop in the Topping & Co family. Tilly from the shop has kindly provided us with a good dose of bookish sustenance. The shop is open for browsing to local readers, and we hope to explore the handcrafted bookcases in person when we can.
Stockists
Cider with Rosie | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Cider with Rosie | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘Every single book Slightly Foxed publish is superb. (And beautifully made.) Just pluck at random from the catalogue and happiness is guaranteed.’ So declared a Foxed reader just the other day, and we’re delighted to add a new book to our list of cloth-bound pocket hardbacks this winter: SF Edition No. 53, Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. Perfectly designed to curl up with, our reissues of classic memoirs are highly individual and absorbing reads, and the latest addition is no exception. Laurie Lee described this, his best-loved and best-known book, as ‘a recollection of early boyhood’, adding the acknowledgement that ‘some facts may have been distorted by time’. Whether or not they have, as one critic put it, ‘Cider with Rosie seems true as long as you’re reading it – and that’s the most important thing.’ It’s not just a rosy picture of a rural past, but a magical evocation of growing up in a lost world that rings emotionally true.
Winter Reading | New this Season from Slightly Foxed

Winter Reading | New this Season from Slightly Foxed

Greetings, dear readers. We’re delighted to announce that the new winter issue of Slightly Foxed is being sent out to subscribers this week and should soon begin to land on doormats around the world. We’d like to reassure you that we are dispatching parcels safely, so please do place orders as usual. There’s still plenty of time to order subscriptions, books and goods in time for Christmas. ⁠Please do go forth and browse our online Readers’ Catalogue, where you’ll find our cloth-bound limited-edition hardbacks, our popular Plain Editions and paperbacks, a collection of literary bundles and goods and our pick of titles from other publishers’ bookshelves. We do hope that it provides some interesting and unusual present solutions. Or perhaps you may be tempted to stock up on some reading for yourself . . .
Episode 26: A Winter’s Tale

Episode 26: A Winter’s Tale

In this seasonal episode, the Slightly Foxed team are guided through a snowstorm of winter writing over twelve centuries by the literary critic and author of Weatherland, Alexandra Harris. The tour takes us from Anglo-Saxon mead halls and monsters to Renaissance bodily humours, then on through cool, translucent Enlightenment weather into the dark cloud of the nineteenth century and beyond. We visit frost-fair carnivals on the frozen Thames with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, brave the Brontës’ wild moorland, stay steamed up indoors with Jane Austen, sink into Dickens’s pea-soupers and see in the ‘year’s midnight’ with John Donne as we listen to a winter’s tale through literature.
43 minutes

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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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