Greetings from Slightly Foxed. We do hope you’re all enjoying roaming far and wide across the literary landscape of Slightly Foxed Issue No. 78 from L. P. Hartley’s Suffolk to News South Wales with Fiona Macfarlane via the French Riviera (and a number of other European destinations) in the footsteps of Eric Ambler. In addition, our new Slightly Foxed Edition, Blood Knots, is proving particularly popular. In it Luke Jennings weaves together the two themes of fishing and friendship through his two boyhood heroes to produce a book of unusual subtlety that’s about a great deal more than fishing.
Looking at the Slightly Foxed shelves here at our office on Hoxton Square in East London, we can’t quite believe we’ve now published 63 Slightly Foxed Editions. While we’ve sold out of many of them, some of them, thankfully, remain in print. One such gorgeous little edition that some of you might have missed is When I Was a Little Boy, a charming childhood memoir by Erich Kästner, author of the immortal children’s book Emil and the Detectives.
Kästner was born in Dresden at the turn of the century and this book shines ‘with the everyday happiness of a close-knit, hardworking family’, writes Sue Gee in her preface to our edition. These early years are set against the backdrop of an ancient city with its baroque buildings, its parades before the Kaiser, its trams and glittering Christmas shops. Delightfully illustrated by Horst Lemke, When I Was a Little Boy is an affecting picture of both Erich’s childhood and of life in his hometown.
Please read on for an extract from When I Was a Little Boy, and a veritable feast of summer reading and other illustrated gems from the vast Slightly Foxed backlist.
We’d also like to remind you that if you’d like to treat a fellow bookworm or, indeed, yourself to something any time in the next two weeks, we’re offering free gift wrap for all orders of £10 or more when you quote the promotional code GIFTWRAP at the final stage of the checkout or over the phone. As always, we’ve plenty of handsome gift cards, reams of brown paper and our understated cream ribbon to hand, and we’re ready to wrap our socks off!