Greetings from Hoxton Square where the new quarter’s usual delightful flurry of orders is keeping the office foxes on their toes. From the latest SF Edition or Cub, new slipcases for the coming year, generous renewals, personalized bookplates, book bags, gift subscriptions for fellow booklovers and even the odd Completely Foxed set, we’re most grateful to you all for your enthusiasm and generosity.
Ordinarily we send out a newsletter just once a month, so you may be wondering why you’ve now received two in fairly swift succession. Well, in last week’s missive we rashly promised we’d be in touch again soon with some further suggestions for Mothering Sunday presents, rather forgetting that in the first half of this week we’d be rushing around to pack up orders and nipping over to St Martin’s Lane to toast the winner of the 2017 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize (many congratulations to Edmund Gordon for The Invention of Angela Carter). We suspect that most of you have been extremely well-organised and have already placed your orders by now, but we did promise so if you are in need of some last-minute ideas you’ll find a few suggestions further down the page.
Whether you’re in need of present suggestions or not, with Sunday fast approaching we thought our newsletter readers might like to be introduced (or reintroduced) to some of the mothers and grandmothers depicted in our list of Editions. Muriel Perry of The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley had her star turn last year, and the year before that it was the long-suffering Mrs Durrell. Of course Diana Holman-Hunt’s My Grandmothers and I is perfect – and now in a new handsome Plain Foxed Edition too – but that’s had several airings in recent months. Nothing obvious sprang to mind, so we went a little deeper into the list, back to Autumn 2014, where we came across the 12-year-old Harold Carlton with that ‘beautiful mother who adored him’ and that glorious, ghastly Grandma in Marrying Out. Do read on for an extract.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF office staff
Jennie, Anna, Olivia and Hattie