The Readers' Catalogue
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readers’catalogue • spring 2018 ‘Hurrah for Slightly Foxed – a truly independent ‘It’s always a red-letter day when the post small publishing house that flourishes while eschewing the lure of Amazon.’ John Sandoe Books includes Slightly Foxed.’ Penelope Lively est. 2004 3 The Readers’ Catalogue Welcome to our quarterly Readers’ Catalogue. Here you’ll find listings for our cloth-bound limited-edition hardbacks, our growing range of collectable children’s books, back issues of Slightly Foxed (all in print) together with handsome slipcases in which to keep them, our popular paperbacks and Plain Editions, a small collection of literary goods and our pick of the most interesting (and sometimes unusual) titles from other publishers’ bookshelves Everything listed in this catalogue or on our website can be sent to you, or directly to a gift recipient, in good time for a date of your choice, and Slightly Foxed subscribers can use their usual discount on all orders. The office is well-stocked with sturdy cardboard packaging, handsome postcards bearing wood engravings, reams of brown paper and signature foxed ribbon in anticipation! Whether or not you order anything we’d like to thank you for your support, and wish you a very happy 2018. With best wishes from Gail, Hazel and all of us here at Slightly Foxed contents Slightly Foxed Edition No. 41, Something Wholesale 4 A Ronald Welch original, The Road to Waterloo 5 Slightly Foxed Editions 6 Plain Foxed Editions 11 Slightly Foxed Paperbacks . 13 Frequently Foxing Questions & Order Form 15 . Slightly Foxed Paperbacks cont. 19 Slightly Foxed Cubs: The BB Books 20 Slightly Foxed Cubs: Ronald Welch 21 Personalized Bookplates 25 Featured in SF Issue 57 and other Spring reading 27 Notebooks, Bags, Back Issues, Slipcases & Cards 31 3 new this spring slightly foxed edition no. 41 Eric Newby, something wholesale My Life and Times in the Rag Trade Who would have thought that the adventurous traveller and decorated wartime hero Eric Newby had started his working life in the rag trade? But that is the story he tells in this characteristically jaunty and very funny book. Newby was in his late twenties when he returned home in 1945 after an adventurous war. He had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy and had fallen in love with his future wife Wanda, who had saved his life when he was hiding out in the mountains – an episode he later memorably described in Love and War in the Apennines. Back in London, however, demobbed and demoralized, he bowed to pressure and joined the family firm. Lane & Newby, ‘Mantle Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers’, occupied a warren of offices in Great Marlborough Street and here young Eric was put to work in the Mantle Department, cutting off lengths of fabric to supply orders for customers such as a Mrs Bangle of Leeds, whose majestic dimensions were given as ‘Hips 62˝. Bust 58˝. Waist 55˝’. Such figures would become a grim reality when he was forced to accompany Mr Wilkins, the head salesman, on one of his twice-yearly excursions to drum up orders in the great industrial towns of the North. As Eric blundered his way through the various departments, doing his best to repel the advances of Lola, the in-house model – ‘a girl so silly her silliness had a sexual quality’ – things were beginning to go wrong at Great Marlborough Street. Eric’s father, an Edwardian patriarch with a light-hearted attitude to accounting, had somehow managed to keep the firm going while sidestepping the more extreme changes in fashion. But he had been running up debts, and during the Fifties Lane & Newby finally collapsed under the weight of a massive tax demand. By this time, however, Eric was laying plans for an excursion to the Hindu Kush – and the rest is travel history. 256 pages • from £16 (uk/eire): £18 (overseas) 4 5 a brand-new carey story the road to waterloo Recently rediscovered among Ronald Welch’s papers and now published for the first time with splendid specially commissioned illustrations, this novella has all the colour and realism of the other books in the series and fills a gap in the story of the Careys. It is June 1815. Napoleon, recently escaped from Elba, is on the march, and 17-year- old James Carey, a Cornet in the 30th Light Dragoons, is patrolling the frontier between France and present-day Belgium, on the lookout for the arrival of Napoleon’s troops. As part of Wellington’s great Allied army this is James’s first experience of active service, but he’s a modest, conscientious and likeable young man, with the added benefit of fluent French, learned from his mother who had fled France during the Revolution – an episode that links this book with the earlier Escape from France. Briefly taken prisoner when his troop encounters an advance party of French Lancers, James manages to escape and takes refuge at a farmhouse where he finds himself sharing accommodation with Wellington’s legendary intelligence officer Colonel Colquhoun Grant. It’s a timely meeting, for it soon becomes clear there has been a disastrous break in communications. Wellington doesn’t yet know that Napoleon has crossed the frontier. Soon James is riding hell for leather to Wellington’s headquarters in Brussels with a vital report for the Duke. The Road to Waterloo is a nail-biting picture of the events leading up to the great battle, of the first encounter of the opposing armies at Quatre Bras, and of the effects of war on a decent and inexperienced young man. illustrated by mark robinson 88 pages • from £14 (uk/eire): £16 (overseas) ‘I loved these books as a child and now my 11-year-old daughter has read them all and loved them as well. Your set is magnificent and already a much-loved family collection.’ M. Islam ‘I wanted to pass on to you personally the joy that my son (aged 10) has experienced in receiving the Ronald Welch full set . he loves history and reading about battles and adventures, so these books have been an absolute delight for him!’ A. Wilson 4 5 slightly foxed editions Our Editions are perfectly designed to curl up with – neat, sturdy little hardbacks, just the right size to hold in the hand and with a ribbon marker to keep your place. More important still, they’re wonderful reads – hitherto forgotten memoirs that bring alive a particular moment, that allow you into someone else’s world and make you feel you have actually known the writer. If you’ve started collecting them already, now could be the moment to fill in any gaps. And if you haven’t – well, you’ve a treat awaiting you. Hand-numbered, cloth-bound hardback limited editions of 2,000 copies per title Coloured endpapers • 170 x 110mm • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker Blind blocking to front • Gold blocking to spine SF Subscriber Price: UK & Ireland £16; Overseas £18 per title Non-Subscriber Price: UK & Ireland £17.50; Overseas £19.50 per title Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika When Elspeth Huxley’s family arrived in Nairobi in 1913, British East Africa was still a Garden of Eden, virtually untouched by the destructive hand of man. It was also a land of dreams, a place for the recouping of lost fortunes by those who hadn’t managed things very well elsewhere. Elspeth Huxley evokes both the harshness and the beauty of the life that, against all the odds, they managed to create, the mutually dependent society of those early white settlers, and the effect of Africa and its native population on the imagination of a solitary and self-sufficient child. (no. 18 • 360 pages) Denis Constanduros, My Grandfather & Father, Dear Father These delightfully funny and affectionate portraits of the two most influential male figures in the author’s life conjure up two strongly defined characters and the times in which they lived. The two could hardly have been more different. Denis’s maternal grandfather, though surviving sturdily into the reign of George V, was to his grandson a character from the ‘warm, gas-lit, stable-smelling past’ of the Victorian age and symbolized everything that was convivial and straightforward and reliable. His father, however, was flamboyant, melo- dramatic and full of grand ideas for solving his perpetual financial problems at a stroke – a tendency which ultimately led to disaster. This is a small jewel of a book. (no. 20 • illus. • 272 pages) 6 7 Ysenda Maxtone Graham, The Real Mrs Miniver The exemplary middle-class housewife Mrs Miniver, whose doings first appeared on the Court pages of The Times, was said by Winston Churchill to have done more for the Allied cause in the Second World War than a flotilla of battleships. Everyone assumed that Mrs Miniver was a portrait of her creator, Jan Struther, but the reality was very different. Ysenda, Jan’s granddaughter, draws a vivid portrait of this fascinating and contradictory woman whose own creation ultimately forced her to lead a painful double life. (no. 21 • 320 pages) Richard Hillyer, Country Boy Richard Hillyer was the pseudonym used by Charles Stranks, a farmworker’s son who grew up in great poverty in a remote Buckinghamshire village in the years before and during the First World War. Country Boy is the extraordinary and moving story of how, against incredible odds, he managed to educate himself and get to university. Written with almost painful honesty, it is a deeply poetic evocation of the unspoilt English countryside and its effect on the imagination of a lone and sensitive boy.