From the Editors

1st March 2020

Slightly Foxed Issue 65: From the Editors

It’s spring again, and a bit of news that feels cheering in today’s disordered world reaches us via an unsolicited email from ‘the world’s leading market intelligence agency’. It seems that the number of Brits who bought a print book was up last year from 51 per cent in 2018 to 56 per cent. The main reason people gave was that they prefer physical books to reading on devices. E-books certainly have their uses, but there are very particular experiences attached to the reading of a physical book, particularly a second-hand one – its look, its feel, its smell, its history as evidenced by the clues left on it and in it by previous owners. Every physical book, like a person, tells a story of its own in a way no digital book can, however convenient.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st June 2019

Slightly Foxed Issue 62: From the Editors

Here in the office, summer is when we try to relax a little, draw breath and catch up with the things for which there isn’t normally time. This year Jennie and Anna are further improving the website and putting on to the index our entire archive of contributions to past issues, so if you are a subscriber, any piece we’ve ever published will soon be available for you to read. Meantime we two will be settling down to some quiet reading in our search for unusual and outstanding memoirs to add to the list of Slightly Foxed Editions. We always welcome your suggestions, so if you have a favourite memoir that is now largely unavailable, do get in touch. There are plenty of forgotten memoirs out there we find, but few have that indefinable voice that makes them unique, and it’s a real joy when we come across one.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
28th February 2019

Slightly Foxed Issue 61: From the Editors

As many of you will already have gathered, if only from the discreet note on the contents page of the winter issue, this spring we’ve embarked on a new project, the Slightly Foxed podcast. Your reaction to this may possibly have been the same as ours when the idea was first put to us: ‘What exactly is a podcast?’ But now that, with some very knowledgeable assistance, we’ve got the hang of it, we realize what an enjoyable way it is of sharing with you more of our life behind the scenes at SF and introducing you to some of the interesting people who help to make the magazine what it is.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
2nd June 2020

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 2 June 2020

This week we’ve been waking up to some of those blue and gold mornings that in my case bring on thoughts of escape and waves of nostalgia, not for hot exotic places, but for the English beaches that stay in your memory for ever if you were lucky enough to know them as a child. Growing up by the sea in Devon, spending all day on the beach (entirely unsupervised) or out in a fishing boat, I genuinely couldn’t imagine what people who didn’t live by the sea did all day. I adored Arthur Ransome’s books (see SF no. 18) but we weren’t Swallows and Amazons children, sailing and building campfires and being self-sufficient. Those kinds of summers were for the children who holidayed down the coast at posher places like Salcombe. For us the sea and the beach were facts of life, places where people earned their living, but they were magical too.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st June 2018

Slightly Foxed Issue 58: From the Editors

For some months now the office in Hoxton Square has been ringing to the sounds of hammering, banging, drilling, and tools dropping on to scaffolding, and we’ve often struggled to hear one another speak. If you build an extension in London today it can usually only go up or down, and our freeholder is adding an extra couple of storeys. We’re told the agony is nearly over and now it’s summer we’re looking forward to coming out of forced hibernation and opening the windows.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st June 2017

Slightly Foxed Issue 54: From the Editors

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.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st March 2017

Slightly Foxed Issue 53: From the Editors

Spring, and it’s precisely thirteen years since the first issue of Slightly Foxed appeared. Then of course we had no idea of what SF would become – more of a friendly worldwide fellowship of readers than simply a magazine. Many of you have been with us from that first issue, and our subscription renewal rate is unusually and cheeringly high. As we frequently tell you, it’s your loyalty and enthusiasm that keep us going, and this year we’ve decided to express our appreciation to you in a more concrete way.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st June 2016

Slightly Foxed Issue 50: From the Editors

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. One of our somewhat irrational fears at the time was that we might run out of books to write about, and people to write about them, but the reverse has been the case. We know from the steady stream of suggestions arriving from contributors inside and outside the literary world that there are still countless unusual and fascinating books to discover. That’s another enjoyable aspect of editing SF: the proof, if one were needed, that you don’t have to be a ‘writer’ to be able to write.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st March 2016

Slightly Foxed Issue 49: From the Editors

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.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st June 2015

Slightly Foxed Issue 46: From the Editors

Now the long summer days are here we like to get out of the city, to meet subscribers and get to know some of the many independent local bookshops which, in spite of difficult times, are still very much alive and kicking. On 11 June we’ll be in Suffolk at just such a shop, Harris & Harris in the pretty old wool town of Clare, to launch the summer issue and the latest of the Slightly Foxed Editions, Adrian Bell’s Silver Ley (see p.13).
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st June 2014

Slightly Foxed Issue 42: From the Editors

With travel in the air, summer’s a time when we think particularly of all those subscribers who read their copies of Slightly Foxed in farflung places. We have subscribers in 60 countries now, and in this tenth anniversary year we’d like to say thank you once again to all of you, at home and abroad, for supporting us, and particularly to those of you who have stuck with us through – as the late publisher Antony Blond once memorably put it – thin and thin. We had an excellent anniversary party – at the Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury, already familiar to some of you from Readers’ Day. Speeches were made, glasses were raised, and Slightly Famous People’s Foxes, the little book we’re publishing in aid of the Children’s Hospital School at Great Ormond Street, was successfully launched.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st March 2014

Slightly Foxed Issue 41: From the Editors

As we mentioned in the last issue, we’re marking our tenth anniversary this year in various ways, but perhaps most importantly with the publication of a very unusual little book. It’s called Slightly Famous People’s Foxes and proceeds from the sale will go to buy books for the Hospital School at Great Ormond Street, which enables children to continue their education while they are there. These won’t be textbooks but books to read for pleasure – most of us probably know how just the right book can ease a stay in hospital, especially for children who may be in isolation or having long and painful treatments. It’s a cause close to our hearts, and we’d be delighted if you felt able to give it your support. The book costs a very affordable £5, and you’ll find a leaflet and an order form enclosed with this issue.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.