With summer over, a touch of frost already in the air, the trees in the square beginning to shed their leaves, and the lights going on earlier, there’s an expectant new-school-year feeling in the office here, with thoughts of autumn events, and busy days to come in the build-up to Christmas. One autumn fixture in the SF calendar we all look forward to is Readers’ Day, which this year is on Saturday 2 November at our regular Bloomsbury haunt, the Art Workers’ Guild in Queen Square. It’s our chance to meet up with subscribers (and their families and friends), a good few of whom come back every year, some from as far away as America.
You could say it’s a mini-literary festival, but what makes it different and, we think, more enjoyable, is that it isn’t simply the packed, book-marketing bun fight that many literary festivals have now become. There’s certainly an opportunity to buy books at the pop-up bookshop, but the emphasis is always on finding interesting speakers, whether they’ve recently published a book or not. The Art Workers’ Guild is a beautiful and quite intimate space, with seating for only a hundred, so if you’re thinking of coming this year do ring the office or email us. There are still some tickets left, but they do go fast.
Our autumn Slightly Foxed Edition, Dorothy Whipple’s childhood memoir The Other Day (see p.13), is a particularly endearing one. It was first published in 1936 when Dorothy was already an established novelist, and it has the same compelling quality as her fiction, quiet on the surface but with powerful currents of feeling running beneath. Her account of growing up in a large, happy, middle-class family in Blackburn, Lancashire, is truly a child’s-eye view, illustrating her observation that ‘children bear a great deal that their elders know nothing of’. She has an acute ear for dialogue, a sharp eye for the telling detail, and a confiding voice that makes you want to listen. It’s a lovely book, poignant, funny and wise.
Adrian Bell is a writer whose books still seem as fresh and relevant to our times as when they were first published, and they’ve been enormously popular with readers. Following his East Anglian farming trilogy, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree, written between the two World Wars and all reissued by Slightly Foxed, in 1950 he began writing a weekly countryside column for the Eastern Daily Press. We’ve now published four seasonal selections from these beautifully observed little pieces, starting in 2021 with A Countryman’s Winter Notebook. This first selection quickly sold out, but the good news is that it’s now available again as part of a set with the other three seasonal selections for Spring, Summer and the newly published Autumn. Together they’re a treasure trove for anyone who loves the countryside, and would make a handsome present, especially when finished off with one of our elegant grey slipcases designed especially to hold all four books. Once you’ve opened them though, you might want to keep them yourself.
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