Introducing the latest addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 55:
Richard Cobb
STILL LIFE
Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood
The historian Richard Cobb, famous for his brilliant books on France and the French Revolution, his inspirational teaching and his unconventional behaviour, grew up in the 1920s and ’30s in the quiet and deeply conventional town of Tunbridge Wells. Yet Cobb loved that small world with its middle-class confidence and soothing predictability – it was, he writes, ‘a society in which a rather frightened child could feel secure’.
In this unusual memoir he recreates it in entrancing detail as he experienced it between the ages of 4 and 13. The book is indeed a ‘still life’, a snapshot of a miniature world caught at a particular moment in time. Yet every page contains some wonderfully recaptured human or geographical detail which stays in the mind and brings the town and its people colourfully alive again. ‘Strange and wonderful,’ wrote Hilary Spurling in the Observer when the book was first published. And indeed it is.
Still Life is published on 1 June, but we’re pleased to report that it’s available to order now. And if you’re on a repeat order to receive each limited-edition memoir each quarter, your usual hand-numbered copy will be dispatched next week.
We look forward to sending glad tidings of the new summer issue of Slightly Foxed magazine later this month. Meantime, please read on for David Gilmour’s preface to our edition of Still Life. We do hope you’ll enjoy it.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF office staff
Jennie, Anna, Hattie & Jess