Notice Board
July 2010
The lavender is blooming but we’re all slightly wilting in the London heat although we remain as cheery as ever — helped in part by lunches on the balcony — but mainly by you, our subscribers. We’re always touched and delighted by the little notes, postcards and letters that you send us from time to time. Here are just a few that have arrived recently.
‘First of all I must tell you how much I have enjoyed my copy of the Spring edition. As a new reader I am delighted to have discovered you!’ D.B.W.
You have the very happy knack of dropping a book through my letter-box just when I am casting about for what to read next. Yesterday evening I finished P.D. James’s Children of Men; this evening I shall read A House in Flanders.’ D.J.
‘Thank you for all the back numbers and slipcases – all arrived safely. I’m like a mouse in a cheese shop – everything is so delicious that I cannot believe the heaven I’m in! So hard to pace my reading and not read ALL in one day! I’m thrilled to have every wonderful volume – THANK YOU’ W.H.
‘A House in Flanders will definitely be my book of 2010 . . . The book is so evocative . . . Please keep up the good work finding such books. I will wait keenly for the next edition.’ D.A.
June 2010
Could Summer have finally arrived? It certainly has at Slightly Foxed HQ as the office is full to bursting with copies of the Summer issue of Slightly Foxed and our tenth Slightly Foxed Edition, Michael Jenkins’s A House in Flanders – the perfect summer read. Michael Jenkins is the first living author that we’ve republished in our Slightly Foxed Edition series and we were delighted to be able to relaunch the book in style this month with Michael, P.D. James and many other friends at Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road. We even bagged a spot in the Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’:
‘BUOYED by her triumph as the Oldie magazine’s Handbagger of the Year — a reference to her demolition of the BBC director-general Mark Thompson — thriller writer Baroness James of Holland Park was at Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road, the antiquarian bookshop, last night for the launch of Michael Jenkins’s A House in Flanders. “There are some books, not necessarily the longest, in which the author’s intention is so perfectly realised, a seminal experience of life so beautifully recorded that the book becomes a small icon to be treasured not only on the shelf of a personal library, but in the mind,” writes P.D. James in the Slightly Foxed Quarterly. No handbagging there.’
May 2010
It feels as though Spring has finally arrived at the Slightly Foxed office in London. The tulips on the balcony are in full bloom, the sun is shining (occasionally), there’s a spring in our step and even the dogs are more perky than usual, which is just as well as Brian (our man with a van) is preparing to make his quarterly journey from our printers in Yorkshire down to London with a van-load of things to keep us busy. He’s bringing advance copies of the forthcoming Summer issue of Slightly Foxed and 2,000 copies of our tenth Slightly Foxed Edition, Michael Jenkins’s A House in Flanders, his account of summer months spent on the edge of the Flanders Plain. ‘A radiant book,’ wrote Dirk Bogarde in the Daily Telegraph, ‘a whole spectrum of colours and lights, of delights and elegances, of wistfulness and love.’ The perfect summer read, in fact.
Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road
The Gloucester Road Bookshop really is now Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road and we’re delighted with its new look. We hope you’ll be able to pay the shop a visit very soon and see for yourself, but here’s a preview . . .
March 2010
The Spring issue has just gone out and copies of the new Slightly Foxed Edition, Ted Walker’s The High Path, have arrived. We were very cheered to receive the following email from a London subscriber on a cold, grey Monday morning . . .
The spring edition arrived on Saturday – one of the first signs of spring – thank you! I jumped on the tube at Tottenham Hale, and noticed that the man opposite was not reading a newspaper like everyone else. I identified it by the print of snowdrops. ‘Excuse me’, I said to him, ‘Snap!’ – waving my copy. ‘Just arrived?’ ‘Yes’, and we both settled down with a smile to read our copies.
Crossword
Slightly Foxed readers were invited to test their literary skills with our crossword in the Winter issue and judging by the hundreds of correct entries we received you truly are a literary lot! Here are the answers.
Across
1 Just beat Miss Woodhouse after noon (3,4) PIP EMMA
7 see 9 across
9, 7 She was penned by a horseman, exhausted (5,7) RIDER HAGGARD
10 Yosser, Dixie, George and Chrissie: his able lads exploded with energy (9) BLEASDALE
11 Irish flower for Tennessee Williams’s Larry (7) SHANNON
14 New Englanders seek any resort (7) YANKEES
16 His Norman lady is welcome, but flare flickers after puff of wind (7,8) GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
18 One caught in thicket, a one caught by the tongue (7) ARAMAIC
20 A clicky true, he might have said (7) SPOONER
22 In us all we turn to a Welsh poet (4,5) ALUN LEWIS
25 I give a card to Wilde’s husband (5) IDEAL
27 John’s mother on a reel, spinning (7)ELEANOR
28, 16 down Strange Thames hankering; energy needed for author of river idyll (7,7) KENNETH GRAHAME
Down
1 Copied from new map edition (4) APED
2 Old essayist needs a doctor after fifty (4) LAMB
3 Happy, almost in heaven, Chas and Ed gave Nick a job (10) CHEERYBLES
4 Encourages breakfast being cooked? (4,2) EGGS ON
5 One seduced Helen, another loved Juliet (5) PARIS
6 Tempestuous woman? Yes and no (7) MIRANDA
8 Sunken river dog, say, swallows shilling (4-3) DEEP SET
12 Italian city goes back in a format so alpine (5) AOSTA
13 His hay fever, a feverish Cold War one (4,6) NOEL COWARD
15 Free-hitting batsman has this – probably two of them (3,2) EYE IN
16 see 28 across
17 Moreish? (7) UTOPIAN
19 Unwell, not succeeding, capital gone (6) AILING
21 Udall’s blustering coward inside a regular alpha male (5) RALPH
23 Benefits of ownership, like Hoggart’s of literacy (4) USES
24 His Bassington – such a kind individual at the start? Not so (4) SAKI
26 Steinbeck’s Trasks east of this project (4) EDEN
February 2010
The shop will be undergoing refurbishment this month and, for one week from 21 February to 1 March, will have to close. We’ve very excited at the prospect of these improvements and look forward to welcoming you when they are complete. Among other changes will be some marvellous displays of cards, wood-engravings and new books.
January 2010
Well we’re slowly getting back to real life following the Christmas break although things have been rather hampered by the weather. Those of us in London have been slipping and sliding to work and with Gail holed up on Dartmoor, Steph snowed in in Hampshire with no power and Hazel hunkering down in icy Highbury we’re a rather far-flung (but still cheery!) team.
In weather like this, there’s nothing quite like SF to curl up with and we recommend you do so, in a comfy chair in front of a fire if possible. Or if you’ve already devoured the latest issue, there’s our new Slightly Foxed Edition, James Lees-Milne’s Another Self to keep you occupied.
And finally, here’s another small but very nice mention of our bookshop in the Times.
It’s official . . .
A gift subscription to Slightly Foxed is (according to the Daily Telegraph’s ultimate gift guide 2009) one of the top ten gifts ‘for him’! We think a subscription to SF makes a great gift for any book lover really but we’re very pleased to be mentioned.
December 2009
Well, the party season is upon us and Christmas is fast approaching. We’ve had our first Christmas card (from a subscriber!) and spent a delightful evening with local subscribers at The Old Harlotry in Canterbury to launch our Winter issue.
Now it’s no more parties for the time being and all hands to the deck to get gift-wrapped copies of the Winter issue, books and back issues off in time for Christmas. We’ve got quite a production line of ribbon-tying, parcel-wrapping, card-writing, envelope-stuffing and posting (not to mention dog-walking and tea-making) on the go.
We’re also having fun planning the shop’s New Year facelift and have been thrilled to hear nice things about both the shop and SF from the literary world.
November 2009
Sighs of relief at SF Towers this morning as we heard the news that the Royal Mail won’t be striking again before Christmas. We were even more cheered when Brian (our man with a van) arrived from the printers with our Winter leaflets and new stationery for the bookshop. We’re already looking forward to Brian’s next visit in a couple of weeks’ time when the new Slightly Foxed Edition, James Lees-Milne’s Another Self, is due to be delivered. If you’d like to order your copy now, we’ll dispatch it to you as soon as stock arrives.
October 2009
The bookshop is looking very cheerful indeed and although it won’t be fully ‘foxed’ until the New Year it’s already looking more SF (thanks to the efforts of Tony, Aimi, Jane and David) with some excellent new stock, a furniture shuffle and a charming new (old) shop bell. Do pop in if you’re in the area, you’ll be warmly received.
We’ve also had another piece of good news this month - a mention of Slightly Foxed in The Times– albeit a small one!
Slightly Foxed acquires a bookshop
Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road
This month we’ve celebrated our sixth successful year by taking over the Gloucester Road Bookshop at 123 Gloucester Road, South Kensington.
For several decades this second-hand bookshop – previously owned and run by Graham Greene’s nephew Nick Dennys and in a great position within a hundred yards or so of Gloucester Road tube station – has been a popular stopping-off point for booklovers. For Slightly Foxed, running this cosy and welcoming shop is a natural extension of what we already do – broadening people’s horizons by introducing them to interesting books that have stood the test of time, many of which are now out of print.
The shop stocks an eclectic but carefully chosen range of old books, a selection of new books and classic reprints from interesting small publishers, and a range of unusual artists’ cards. It also provides a showcase for Slightly Foxed and for its successful limited-edition pocket hardback series Slightly Foxed Editions.
Run by manager Tony Smith and his friendly, well-informed staff, the bookshop is open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays, and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays.
123 Gloucester Road
South Kensington
London SW7 4TE
(3 minutes’ walk from Gloucester Road tube station
on the Circle, Piccadilly and District lines)
tel: 020 7370 3503 • e-mail: enquiries@foxedbooks.com
www.foxedbooks.com
September 2009
The relative calm of August is over, the rain has returned (did it ever go away?) and the office is full to bursting with copies of the Autumn issue of Slightly Foxed and the latest Slightly Foxed Edition, Michael Wharton’s The Missing Will. Its author was better known as Peter Simple, whose satirical ‘Way of the World’ column in the Daily Telegraph featured such deathless creations as Julian Birdbath, the unsuccessful writer, the psychoanalyst Dr Heinz Kiosk, and Dr Spacely-Trellis, the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon. This first, absurdly entertaining volume of autobiography describes his early years in Bradford and the path that finally led him, via a lamentable Oxford career, army service in India and years adrift in post-war bohemia, to Fleet Street.
We’re furiously stuffing books into envelopes and filling postbags to get copies off to waiting subscribers, and Chudleigh the office dog is adding to the chaos by raiding the waste-paper bin and stealing whatever he can lay his paws on. Thankfully he seems to know that books are off limits!
Here he is in a rare quiet moment.
Chudleigh the Office Dog
August 2009
Now summer has finally crept up on us again – at least we hope it has – and we can think of no more soothing or enjoyable holiday reading than the latest of the Slightly Foxed Editions, Corduroy by the writer Adrian Bell, one of the classic accounts of English country life. Filled with the most precise yet poetic descriptions of life on a Suffolk farm during the 1920s, it was a book, his son the MP Martin Bell tells us, that many soldiers took with them to the battlegrounds of the Second World War, to remind them of the world of peace and sanity they had left behind.
With Chudleigh the office cocker spaniel puppy on holiday in Devon and many of you away in foreign parts we’re enjoying a few weeks of relative calm here in the Slightly Foxed office before copies of the autumn issue of Slightly Foxed and the forthcoming Slightly Foxed Edition, Michael Wharton’s absurdly entertaining memoir The Missing Will, arrive in September.
May 2009
The Slightly Foxed office is feeling rather crowded this spring with an increasing number of back issues and Slightly Foxed Editions to store – not to mention our new member of staff – Chudleigh, the cocker spaniel puppy. He loves visitors (and so do we) so do drop in if you happen to be in Clerkenwell and have time on your hands.
Now summer is creeping up on us (or at least we hope so) and we’re awaiting copies of the summer issue of Slightly Foxed and the latest Slightly Foxed Edition, Adrian Bell’s Corduroy, one of the classic accounts of English country life.
We’re also delighed to say that we’ve reprinted Ghost Writer, the first of our Christmas Foxes which we published in 2005 – the intriguing true story of the Arabic manuscript of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, told via its ghost-writer, Tim Mackintosh-Smith. An unusual spine-chiller, at £5 it makes a perfect small gift.
March 2009
In February we celebrated our fifth anniversary in style with a party for our contributors, illustrators, advisers, printers and designers, at No. 50, Albemarle Street – former home of the publisher John Murray. We’ve come a long way in five years thanks to the support of our subscribers. The first issue went out to 600 people, the envelopes were stuffed on the kitchen table and we made more trips to the local post box with bulging carrier bags than we can bear to remember! This month, over 5,000 copies of the Spring issue went out to subscribers in more than 60 countries around the world, and hundreds of copies of the latest Slightly Foxed Edition – No. 5: Priscilla Napier, A Late Beginner – followed them.
The Byron Room at No. 50 Albemarle Street
Exotic Subscribers
Businesslike people sometimes ask us about our ‘reader profile’ – who, they wonder, would be a ‘typical Slightly Foxed subscriber’. We find this impossible to answer, except to say that you all clearly love reading and have shown yourselves to be an exceptionally nice bunch of people – courteous, generous, loyal, and with a telling turn of phrase, judging by your letters. What we do know is that you are spread far and wide, and during the dark, rainy days of last summer, as we posted off copies of the latest issue, we wondered rather longingly about the warm and exotic places in which you might be reading it. So we sent some of you who live overseas a note, asking you to send us a postcard describing your favourite surroundings for reading Slightly Foxed.
One interesting fact that emerged was that many of you read it in the bath – whether it’s a bathtub in Boston, Beijing or the Balearics. ‘How I wish I could say I sit on my patio facing south, or in my pergola facing north while enjoying SF,’ wrote a reader from Mexico. ‘The awful truth is, I read it in the bathroom, facing nothing.’ ‘I didn’t think I had a favourite reading spot,’ writes another from Austria, ‘but I’ve just found my latest issue, squeezed between a basket of plastic ducks and the tooth mugs, and realized that of course I do. What greater luxury could there be than a hot bath and Slightly Foxed (especially when the children are asleep)?’
Others waxed more lyrical. ‘I usually read SF in my Sydney garden, watched by the green parrots in my wattle tree,’ writes one Australian subscriber, while another reads his ‘on lazy Sundays, in my comfy old bed, in a house full of books, on a limestone hill, overlooking the town of Fremantle with the breezy blue Indian Ocean in the background.’ And a subscriber in Athens reads SF in a little house ‘tucked beneath the Hill of Nymphs, a few hundred metres to the north-west of the Acropolis’ or lying in the shade of a carob tree near the spot where Pericles lies buried.
An Indian subscriber enjoys Slightly Foxed on a balcony above the teeming streets of Mumbai, while a fellow SFer reads on a bench under a spreading tree overlooking the hills in Brazil’s high central savannas. Yet another snatches a few quiet minutes with her latest copy in a Brussels café over a cup of mint tea while she waits for her 5-year-old son to finish his music lesson. And a dealer in rare books in Milan paints a touching picture of himself taking Slightly Foxed out of his drawer and reading it in the troglodytic circumstances in which he works, ‘in a little recess, ten feet underground, in a library’, surrounded by towering bookshelves.
Whiling away the 45-minute ferry crossing to the mainland from the Outer Hebrides with SF, waiting for its ‘erratic arrival (due to weather conditions)’ on Alderney in winter – it’s thrilling to think of all the different circumstances in which people enjoy Slightly Foxed, and these were just a few of the many postcards we received. Thank you all for taking the trouble to reply.
