Greetings from Hoxton Square where we’ve returned well-rested and ready for the year ahead following a relaxing Christmas break. We’ve been busy opening piles of post, replying to cheering emails and combing through crossword competition entries, and now our thoughts are turning to the annual office overhaul: shelf-shuffling, book-shifting and making space in preparation for a new year’s worth of publications. We hope to be more methodical than fellow book-hoarder and library-lover Richard Mabey, who shared his approach to sorting books in Slightly Foxed Issue 47:
A collection of books begins, I guess, as a kind of landscape. You plan its geological layers, cliffs, niches, ante-chambers. Hillocks and book-quakes erupt where the mass gets critical. And your Organizing System is probably more Capability Brown than Dewey Decimal. Inside this, as I’m sure is true with all booklovers, the whole house becomes ‘landskipp’d’.
Our new offerings for spring will be rolling off the presses and into the landscape of the SF office in not too long. The forthcoming quarter will bring the 65th issue of Slightly Foxed with its usual eclectic and wide-ranging recommendations for good reading, our 50th SF Edition, Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly’s wartime diaries, To War with Whitaker, and Rosemary Sutcliff’s vivid and touching childhood memoir Blue Remembered Hills, reissued in a cloth-bound hardback Plain Foxed Edition. Coming later this year there’ll be Christopher Robbins’s funny, colourful story of a friendship, The Empress of Ireland, and the next two titles in our Cubs series of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman novels, Frontier Wolf and The Lantern Bearers.
Therefore, if you’d like to help us clear a few shelves and take the opportunity to stock up on paperbacks, back issues, Foxed Cubs and any other tempting bookish goods we’d be most grateful. To bring some cheer to the start of the year, we’re continuing our special festive December offers until the end of January – please do browse our various bundles and offers in our newsletter and online.
Should you wish to place an order, by way of thanks we’ll send you a complimentary copy of Linda Leatherbarrow’s charming paperbound short story Between the Lines for all orders over £30. Just enter the code NEWYEAR at the online checkout or quote it over the phone.
If you have no need for anything foxed at this time, you might like to leave this email here and jump over to our website to read Richard’s full article from SF Issue 47: More Capability Brown
We’ll be in touch again soon. Meantime we wish you a happy New Year.
With best wishes from the SF office staff,
Jennie, Anna, Hattie, Jess and Helen
– and the office dogs Chudleigh, Stanley, Tarka & Dusty