TOAST Magazine | Well-Loved Pages

Feature: TOAST Magazine
Words: Jo Rodgers
Photography: Leia Morrisson

Gail Pirkis and Hazel Wood, the co-founders of Slightly Foxed magazine, met as editorial colleagues at John Murray, where both had become disenchanted by the churn of big publishing houses: new crops of books, season after season. They started kicking around ideas to celebrate great books that had already been published, and in 2004, the first issue of Slightly Foxed appeared. It was a handsome, large-pocket-sized journal printed in Yorkshire, full of personal essays about old books – some funny, some tender, nearly all of them love letters.

TOAST Magazine | Gail Pirkis speaks to Jo Rodgers, Photos by Leia Morrisson

 

Slightly Foxed contributors include authors, academics, and journalists, as well as people who have never been published. “They may have been hospital administrators or lawyers or teachers or whatever it may be, but they have it,” says Gail. “It’s hard to define what it is when you read a piece by somebody who’s a real writer, but you instantly know it, and finding those people widens our scope of interest”.

Over 22 years in business, subscriptions have grown steadily from around 600 to over 8,000, and Slightly Foxed now has a couple of other branches: a podcast that delves more deeply into the books written about in the magazine, and a traditional publishing arm that reissues beautiful, cloth-bound books that Gail and Hazel think deserve another airing. Still, the core objective is the same. “With each issue,” says Gail, “we try to produce something that’s interesting to read from cover to cover, and in which you might find three or four books you haven’t come across, and absolutely need to read.” . . .

TOAST Magazine | Gail Pirkis speaks to Jo Rodgers, Photos by Leia Morrisson

Your professional background was in book publishing. How did you end up as the editor of a literary magazine?

Yes, Hazel and I both worked at John Murray for quite a long time. It was taken over by a much bigger company, the dynamics of it changed, and it seemed to us, at the time, that there was less focus on editorial, and more on sales and marketing. It just wasn’t for us. We spent about six months meeting and chatting about what else we might do.

And then I came up with the idea for the magazine, partly inspired by Susan Hill’s magazine, Books and Company, which didn’t run for very long, but was also a magazine about books. We did a business plan, raised money from shareholders, and then in November 2003 we suddenly had our funding. I rang Hazel up and said “We’ve got money in the bank! We better start working on the first issue.” The first issue came out in March 2004.

Back then, Waterstone’s was selling books “3 for the price of 2,” celebrity memoirs were in vogue, and it seemed to us that there was a lot of good literature on people’s backlists, all out of print, which was overlooked and worth reading. So we wanted to celebrate books that endure, which obviously includes the classics that everybody knows about, but also the many minor gems that might not have received the attention they deserved when they first came out, and haven’t gone onto people’s radars.

There’s a real mix of genres in the magazine too – fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, cookery, quite a lot of memoir, history, collections of letters – you know, the full range. Hazel always describes it as a bran tub. There’s a bit of everything in there . . .

TOAST Magazine | Gail Pirkis speaks to Jo Rodgers, Photos by Leia Morrisson

To commission the first essays in the magazine, were you going around to writers who you know, and saying, could you please write about an overlooked book that you love? Presumably, having spent your careers in publishing, and around writers, was useful.

Yes, exactly that. I’ve been in book publishing all my working life, so I had quite a lot of authors to draw on. And in addition to publishing, Hazel had worked on the book pages of The Telegraph for quite a while, so we had a good range of people, journalists as well as authors.

We also paid people right from the beginning. We’ve never asked people to do things for free, or as a favour, because I think if you’re going to be a serious business, people need to be paid, and paid promptly, for what they do.

Some of the people who wrote for us at the beginning are still with us, and we have a stable of around 50 people who write for us regularly – maybe once a year. Then there are others who may only write one piece on a subject that happens to interest them. We also try very hard to include people who write really well, but aren’t necessarily professional writers . . .

Read the full article in TOAST Magazine >>

TOAST Magazine | Gail Pirkis speaks to Jo Rodgers, Photos by Leia Morrisson

“With each issue,” says Gail, “we try to produce something that’s interesting to read from cover to cover, and in which you might find three or four books you haven’t come across, and absolutely need to read.”

There’s a real mix of genres in the magazine too - fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, cookery, quite a lot of memoir, history, collections of letters - you know, the full range. Hazel always describes it as a bran tub. There’s a bit of everything in there.


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