Well, happy New Year to you all, dear readers! We hope you had a most enjoyable Christmas season, filled with good company, good food and plenty of reading time. Our tenth anniversary year really was a happy and fruitful one and we’re looking forward to seeing what’s in store for the coming year. Thank you to all those who placed orders for books and foxy goods or renewed subscriptions online over Christmas and New Year. It was most heartening to return to a postbox brimming not just with orders, but also with the sort of festive cards and cheery greetings that we’re always so touched and delighted to receive from readers.
We don’t know about you but even we perennially cheerful SFers are in need of a little extra help in January, so this month’s newsletter bears one of our favourite spring artworks: the British illustrator Simon Dorrell’s ‘Foxgloves’ from Issue 14. The little fox peering out through the digitalis reminds us that spring will soon come again and with it the longer days and warmer nights, as well as the new spring issue of the quarterly and our first books of the year.
Meantime we thought we’d start the year with an article from our increasingly rich archive of back issues. In the following extract from SF 17, the novelist, essayist and historian Ronald Blythe who, like us, ‘delights in the physical nature of books, their paper, their odour . . . ’ describes the pleasure he gained from inheriting a friend’s library of pocket editions.