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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Now that spring has come . . . | Seasonal reading from Slightly Foxed

Now that spring has come . . . | Seasonal reading from Slightly Foxed

Greetings from Hoxton Square, where we’re looking forward to the Easter break next week and the prospect of fresh air, feasting and, most importantly, time to read. Therefore, if you would like to give the gift of good reading to a fellow booklover (or yourself!) in time for the long weekend, we suggest placing your order in the coming days. The office will be closed from 5.30 p.m. Thursday 14 April until 9.30 a.m. on Tuesday 19 April for Easter. However, our online shop will be open all hours as always, so do feel free to order books, invest in a literary bundle, pick up a tote bag, acquire a notebook, stock up on bookplates, renew your subscription – or, indeed, take out a new subscription – while we’re away, and we’ll send out all orders as soon as we’re back at the packing desk.
Inspire a love of reading | Slightly Foxed Cubs

Inspire a love of reading | Slightly Foxed Cubs

Today, 2 April, is both Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday and International Children’s Book Day, which is celebrated each year to inspire a love of reading and to call attention to children’s literature. Not that we need an excuse to do so here at SF HQ, of course. However, we thought it only fitting to shine the spotlight on our series of Slightly Foxed Cubs this weekend. These beautifully produced collectable children’s books strike a nostalgic chord with many older readers and introduce a younger generation to writers whose marvellous books have, unaccountably, been allowed to slip out of print. Bound in coloured cloth, with printed endpapers and original illustrations, the Cubs make ideal presents for the young and young at heart. Whether you wish to escape into nature with BB, venture back to Roman Britain with Rosemary Sutcliff, join up the dots of history with Ronald Welch or begin to build a library for a bookworm by picking a few titles by each author (or collecting the full set at once) we have books, bundles and offers to satisfy all readers and occasions.
Jan Morris | Conundrum | Rescued – a grand love

Jan Morris | Conundrum | Rescued – a grand love

‘Conundrum is the nearest thing Jan has written to an autobiography. But as she herself acknowledges, in a sense all her writing is autobiographical. Her books represent conversations between Jan Morris and the places she is writing about. Her approach is wholly subjective, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that she has imposed her personality on the entire world. Yet Conundrum is indeed unique among her books.’ Derek Johns in his preface to Slightly Foxed Edition No. 46: Jan Morris, Conundrum
‘She was an artist, a light-giver and an original’ | Slightly Foxed gift ideas

‘She was an artist, a light-giver and an original’ | Slightly Foxed gift ideas

With Mothering Sunday approaching we thought some of you may appreciate a few bookish gift ideas for the mother figures in your lives – or for any fellow booklover or, indeed, yourself! All items can be wrapped in handsome brown paper, tied up with our cream ribbon and sent directly to recipient, or to you to hand over in person. If you’re worried about delivery times, or if you’re cutting it a little fine when placing your order, you can also choose to have an instant gift card sent to you to print out at home or sent straight to the recipient by email.
Conundrum | Chapter 7: Rescued – a grand love . . .

Conundrum | Chapter 7: Rescued – a grand love . . .

Love rescued me from that remote and eerie capsule, as it rescued me from self-destruction, and everything they say about love, in dicta sublime as in lyric abysmal, is demonstrably true. I have loved people with disconcerting frequency all of my life, but I have enjoyed one particular love of an intensity so different from all the rest, on a plane of experience so mysterious, and of a texture so rich, that it overrode from the start all my sexual ambiguities, and acted like a key to the latch of my conundrum.
Portrait of Elmbury | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Portrait of Elmbury | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘I have written a book which gives me much pleasure. It is a kind of full-length portrait of a small country town between the wars. The sort of life that will never come back,’ John Moore wrote to T. H. White in the summer of 1945. That book was Portrait of Elmbury, and we’re delighted to announce that it’s now available to readers again, published in a cloth-bound hardback Plain Foxed Edition. These sturdy little books, bound in duck-egg blue cloth, come in the same neat pocket format as the original SF Editions. Portrait of Elmbury is the first volume in the trilogy based on his home town that Moore wrote shortly after the Second World War, following it in 1946 with Brensham Village and in 1948 with The Blue Field.
‘Slightly Foxed is among the special, cherished delights of each season’ | New this spring

‘Slightly Foxed is among the special, cherished delights of each season’ | New this spring

Greetings, dear readers. We’re delighted to announce that the new Spring issue of Slightly Foxed (No. 73) has now left the printing press at Smith Settle and will start to arrive with readers in the UK very soon and elsewhere over the next few weeks. It ranges far and wide in the usual eclectic manner: Daisy Hay goes for a walk in Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire • Chris Saunders considers the art of bookselling with Penelope Fitzgerald • Suzi Feay enters the strange world of Arthur Machen • Tim Pears salutes a Bosnian chronicler • Daisy Dunn visits ancient Greece with Mary Renault • Gustav Temple is unnerved by Patricia Highsmith, and much more besides . . . We hope it will provide plenty of recommendations for reading off the beaten track this spring. With it, as usual, you’ll find a copy of our latest Readers’ Catalogue, detailing new books, our backlist, recommended seasonal reading and a selection of offers and bundles.
Lark Rise | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Lark Rise | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Introducing the latest addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 58: Flora Thompson, Lark Rise, published 1 March. Lark Rise – and its sequels Over to Candleford and Candleford Green – must be some of the best loved books ever written. They are unique both for the magical quality of the writing and for the background of their author. While most other countryside writers of the period were comfortably middle-class, this record of a vanishing world came from the daughter of a builder’s labourer.
Episode 40: Adrian Bell: Back to the Land

Episode 40: Adrian Bell: Back to the Land

The farmer-cum-writer Adrian Bell is best-known for his rural trilogy of Suffolk farming life, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree. To explore Bell’s life and writing the Slightly Foxed editors are joined by Richard Hawking, chairman of the Adrian Bell Society, author of At the Field’s Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside and editor of A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, a selection of Bell’s newspaper columns. From the pride of the wagon maker, the repeal of the corn act in the 1920s and the heartbreak of farmers going bankrupt to his bohemian mother making butter, his friend John Nash illustrating Men and the Fields and Second World War soldiers packing Corduroy in their kit bags, we learn that Bell is the perfect writer to reconnect people with the land, one whose work still feels relevant today. And in our usual round-up of recommended reading we enter Walter de la Mare’s dreams, explore Shackleton’s Antarctica and visit Catherine Fox’s fictional Lindchester, the setting for her glorious twenty-first-century Trollopian tales.
42 minutes
Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood | Richard Cobb

Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood | Richard Cobb

In Still Life, Richard Cobb recreates the small world of Tunbridge Wells in entrancing detail as he experienced it between the ages of 4 and 13. He leads us through the town and into the lives of the characters among whom he grew up, from the mysterious Black Widow to Baroness Olga, the town’s only victim of the Russian Revolution. At home his mother entertains her tweed-and-Jaeger-clad Bridge-playing friends while down the road in their large, dank Victorian mansion his extraordinary cousins the Limbury-Buses live their lives according to an unchanging regime of walks, rests and meals which are timed to the minute. ‘Strange and wonderful,’ wrote Hilary Spurling in the Observer when the book was first published. And indeed it is.

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