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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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.
Just the Way It Is

Just the Way It Is

I first came across William Trevor in the early nineties when my son came home from school with The Children of Dynmouth, his GCSE set text. I’ve been an ardent fan ever since, although I must admit that in one’s robust forties Trevor’s themes (sadness, loneliness, cruelty, the sheer arbitrariness of life’s awfulness) can be relished in a way that becomes increasingly difficult with age, as one’s skin thins and that arbitrariness begins to bite.
SF magazine subscribers only
11th November 2020

The shocking story of Charles and Mary Lamb: Slightly Foxed podcast reviewed

This story might have made for lurid telling, but the podcasters let James set it out plainly before interjecting with pertinent questions and steering the discussion to the Lambs’ work. The respectful quietness of Slightly Foxed is one of its virtues. Where other podcasts suffer from a crescendo of competing voices, this is steady and understated and, yes, all the cosier for being so.
- Spectator
From readers

Scaling Gibbon’s Everest

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788) must rank among the best known of unread or partly read books. At over 3,000 pages it is written in the sometimes convoluted style of the eighteenth century and lingers over details which mean little now to most readers, not least disputes over the nature of the Holy Trinity. Yet this Everest of a book asks to be scaled and in the end retirement offered me leisure and the necessary oxygen to make the attempt.
SF magazine subscribers only
‘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.
A Merry Malady

A Merry Malady

Let’s begin with a brief quiz. Have you ever arrived home, triumphant with glee over your latest bookshop find, only to discover that you already have the book you just purchased? Have you ever attempted to bring home unobserved a stack of newly purchased books, and thus avoid the censorious lift of the eyebrows of loved ones which so often greets your latest acquisitions? Have you ever begun reading a book you’ve been looking forward to for years, even decades, only to discover your own notes in the margins? (If so, you are a bibliolathas.) Are you on first-name terms with the staff of three bookshops or more? Have you ever had to reinforce a sagging floor because of the weight of your books? Have you ever had to add a room on to your home or move to a larger one to accommodate them?
SF magazine subscribers only
A Lost Enchanted World

A Lost Enchanted World

Not long ago, in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, I was transfixed by a vast oil painting; Viktor Vasnetsov’s Bogatyrs (Men of Power) – astride their horses, one brown, one black, one white. I felt a thrill of recognition. Here were the three brothers, born to a poor widow in a single night and named Evening, Midnight and Sunrise, ‘all three as strong as any of the strong men and mighty bogatyrs who have shaken this land of Russia with their tread’.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st December 2020

Slightly Foxed Issue 68: From the Editors

After probably the strangest year that most of us have ever experienced, London is starting to feel more familiar. There are lighted office windows around Hoxton Square, and there’s traffic again in Old Street, now including shoals of bikes, some darting in and out of the cars and vans like minnows, some wobbling dangerously. There are a lot of new and inexperienced bike riders in London these days, and whether you’re walking or driving you have to look out. At Slightly Foxed the office is buzzing, and readers and contributors have been active too, putting pen to paper, or rather finger to key, to give the two of us plenty to read after lockdown. Sadly we had to cancel Readers’ Day this year, but we’ve booked the Art Workers’ Guild for 6 November 2021, and we look forward very much to seeing you there.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors

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