Slightly Foxed

I love reading about books. Sometimes I think I spend more time reading about books in journals & on blogs, than actually reading the books. One journal I can’t do without though is Slightly Foxed. I’ve been a subscriber since the beginning, about five years ago. Slightly Foxed isn’t interested in the latest bestseller or celebrity biography. The books they review are rarely new & often not even in print. Slightly Foxed reviews books that may have slipped under the radar or fallen out of favour or fashion. Their reviewers are passionate about their choices. These are books they care about, they want to see them in print again or at least bought secondhand & read or read before they fall out of print. I always come across either an old favourite – recently 84 Charing Cross Rd by Helene Hanff & Sarah Caudwell’s detective novels – or something that sounds so enticing I have to read it – John Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels & James Hilton’s Lost Horizon – or usually both. They’ve also started reprinting beautiful little hardback Slightly Foxed Editions of memoirs by writers like Rosemary Sutcliff, Diana Holman-Hunt & V S Pritchett. Like Persephone Books, Slightly Foxed, the journal & the Editions, are beautiful objects as well as being absorbing reading. Thick, creamy paper (why don’t more publishers use it? So much easier on the eye than dead water flimsy paper) & the perfect size to slip into a handbag or pocket.