Now the Christmas rush is over and spring is in the air, it’s all paint charts and carpet samples at Slightly Foxed. The bookshop facelift is under way, and after dealing with urgent matters like leaks and cracks – it’s an old building and the storeroom and office space run under the pavement, with all that that implies – we’re on to the fun part now. We’re (slightly) changing the name to ‘Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road’ – look out for the foxy sign! In corporate-speak it would probably be called ‘rebranding’, but as you know, we’re anything but corporate, and in any case we don’t want to change the shop’s essential welcoming character, which its regulars value so much.
Renovations should be complete by the end of March, and until the end of May we’re offering subscribers a 10 per cent discount on any purchases. So do get in touch with Tony (tel: 020 7370 3503, email: [email protected]) if there are books you want to get hold of, either old or new.
Orders for Slightly Foxed Editions should still come to us at Slightly Foxed, and we highly recommend The High Path, the latest in the series, by the poet Ted Walker, which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography when it was first published in 1982 (see p.13). Ted’s father, whom he deeply loved and admired, was a carpenter who came south to find work on the Sussex coast in the 1930s. The High Path is a beautiful evocation of a happy childhood in smalltown England during the Thirties and Forties, and of a proud, thrifty working-class world that is now entirely lost.
Well, our vision of you as a pretty literary lot was certainly confirmed by the number of you who completed our Christmas crossword. The first correct entry to be opened was from Mrs Edwards in Wakefield, Yorkshire, who wins a year’s subscription. Congratulations!
For those of you who find you simply haven’t any more room on your bookshelves, we recently received an e-mail from a reader drawing our attention to an interesting website: www.readitswapit.co.uk. It is, as its name suggests, a website for swapping books – all you need is a book to start you off and all it costs is the postage. You can register your wants too, so that when a book becomes available you receive an e-mail. Mr Griffiths tells us that he has found a number of out-of-print books mentioned in SF this way. ‘Most of my reading now comes from readitswapit and I’ve made some wonderful discoveries,’ he says. It sounds like an excellent idea, and very green.
And finally – oh dear – an apology. Eagle-eyed readers will no doubt already have spotted a very obvious mistake in the winter issue (to make it more fun, we won’t say exactly where). How could it have happened, when we both read the proofs of the issue several times? We won’t make excuses – just cringe, and say we’re sorry.