The chance to collect the earliest four available hand-numbered Slightly Foxed Editions, limited to 2,000 copies of each title.
SFE No. 33: Diana Petre, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley
Diana and her twin sisters grew up in Barnes, South London, in the care of an elderly housekeeper, having been abandoned in 1912 by their mother, the enigmatic Mrs Muriel Perry, whose real name and true identity were a mystery. After an absence of ten years, Muriel reappeared and took charge of her children, with disastrous results. For the girls, one of the highlights of their isolated lives were visits from a kindly man they knew as ‘Uncle Bodger’. In fact, as Muriel finally revealed, he was their father, Roger Ackerley.
SFE No. 40: Erich Kästner, When I Was a Little Boy
Erich Kästner, author of the immortal children’s book Emil and the Detectives, was born at the end of the nineteenth century in Dresden – that ‘wonderful city full of art and history’ which was razed to the ground by the Allies in 1945. Erich’s gentle father Emil, a master-saddler, and his mother Ida, an intelligent woman who set up as a hairdresser, had come to Dresden from small-town Saxony. Times were tough, and Erich grew up in a tenement flat at the shabby end of a long street called the Königsbrücker Strasse. Yet the book shines with the everyday happiness of a young boy’s life in a close-knit, hardworking family, set against the backdrop of the ancient city with its baroque buildings, its parades before the Kaiser, its trams and glittering Christmas shops. When I Was a Little Boy is an affecting picture of both Erich’s childhood and the city he never ceased to mourn.
SFE No. 41: Eric Newby, Something Wholesale
Who would have thought that the adventurous traveller and decorated wartime hero Eric Newby had started his working life in the rag trade? But that is the story he tells in this characteristically jaunty and very funny book. Lane & Newby, ‘Mantle Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers’, occupied a warren of offices in Great Marlborough Street and here young Eric was put to work in the Mantle Department, and forced to accompany Mr Wilkins, the head salesman, on one of his twice yearly excursions to drum up orders in the great industrial towns of the North. As Eric blundered his way through the various departments, things were beginning to go wrong. Eric’s father, an Edwardian patriarch with a light-hearted attitude to accounting, had been running up debts, and during the Fifties Lane & Newby finally collapsed. By this time, however, Eric was laying plans for an excursion to the Hindu Kush – and the rest is travel history.
SFE No. 43: Jennie Erdal, Ghosting
Jennie Erdal’s boss is a man she calls ‘Tiger’, the flamboyant figure at the centre of Ghosting, the strange and gripping story of the twenty years in which she became his ghost writer, pulling the wool over the eyes of reviewers and turning him into the literary lion he had always wanted to be. He is a bold independent publisher, she a translator with a young family, excited when Tiger asked her to join his firm as a commissioning editor. Erdal needed an income and gradually over the years she was drawn into a weird, symbiotic relationship as she created a whole literary oeuvre in Tiger’s name, even turning his ludicrous plot ideas and sexual fantasies into novels that were seriously and admiringly reviewed. Ghosting is a wickedly funny book, but it is also a thoughtful look at deception and self-deception and the masks that most of us wear.
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