On a bright Thursday afternoon earlier this month, the Foxed office shut up shop and hopped on a train to Cambridge. We were off on a jaunt to Heffers Bookshop to launch the latest issue of Slightly Foxed and the new paperback edition of Frances Wood’s memoir Hand-grenade Practice in Peking.
Heffers was the perfect place to celebrate these publications, not only because it is a rather resplendent bookshop in beautiful, cobbled Cambridge, but because it also holds multiple personal connections. Both our Editor Gail Pirkis and Publicity Manager Steph Allen have worked at Heffers itself, and Frances Wood studied Chinese at Newnham College, regularly visiting the bookshop when a student.
Long-time supporters of Slightly Foxed, the Heffers staff had created an impressive window display, and copies of the quarterly and paperbacks were attractively fanned out with bookmarks ready to be picked up and flicked through. Once our audience had gathered, glasses of wine in hand, bookseller Richard Reynolds gave an entertaining introduction to the evening, handing over to our Editor Hazel Wood who took us on a whistle-stop tour of everything Slightly Foxed. Then we were treated to a reading from Hand-grenade Practice in Peking by Frances Wood, leaving the audience tickled.
It was a real pleasure to meet so many local subscribers, Heffers customers, members of the bookshop’s Book Group and Slightly Foxed contributors. We could have stayed chatting, sipping wine, browsing shelves and buying books all night if we didn’t have a train to catch back down to London.
View some photos from the evening below, and listen to a recording of the talks here:
