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Slightly Foxed Issue 11: From the Editors

It’s one of those pleasant moments when nothing very particular is happening in the office. Pugwash the cocker spaniel is snoring in the late summer sunshine by the terrace window, a splendid helper is stuffing envelopes on the kitchen table, and from time to time the phone rings with a request for a slipcase or a subscription. Or it may be one of you just ringing in for a chat, which is always delightful. It’s a golden, meditative time, when the summer’s nearly over and the madness of the Christmas season hasn’t begun.

So perhaps it is, in fact, a good time to get ahead with Christmas. When it comes to bookish friends and relatives, you might consider taking out a gift subscription to Slightly Foxed – possibly even adding one of our distinguished grey slipcases. They’re going like hot cakes, we’re delighted to say, and sales have far exceeded our expectations. Back issues are a good present, too, for recent subscribers, and four back issues in a slipcase make a very handsome gift.

Flushed with the success of our first excursion into ‘merchandizing’, and encouraged by your comments on our covers, we’re now offering four of them as postcards, plus (by popular request) David Eccles’s splendid version of A Curse Against Book Stealers which appeared in Issue 9. Interesting postcards, in our experience, are incredibly useful and quite hard to find, and we can see that A Curse Against Book Stealers has a number of practical applications too! For further details see the advertisement on p.96.

There’s also another little ‘Christmas Fox’ on the way. A great many of you bought and enjoyed last year’s Ghost Writer. This year’s The Reluctant Biographer by Jeremy Lewis is equally delightful but very different – a lighthearted look at the author’s unexpected second career as the authorized biographer of Cyril Connolly (among others). Any of you who have read Kindred Spirits, his hilarious account of his first career in publishing, will know what a treat this year’s Christmas Fox is going to be – the perfect small present or special Christmas card. We’ll be sending you details shortly.

If you’re in the vicinity and feel like picking any of these items up in person, please do call. We’re always delighted to see subscribers, on any pretext, or no pretext at all. The landmark to look out for is a pub called The Slaughtered Lamb, on the corner of Great Sutton Street, EC1 (we hope David Eccles’s drawing will help you to identify it). Turn into Northburgh Street when you reach the pub, and the entrance to Dickinson Court is about 50 yards along on your left.


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