Contents

A Plug for Dr Brewer • a. f. harrold

Dream of Old England • andrew sinclair

Lytton’s Characteristic Specimen • ariane bankes

Chips Triumphant • john hammond

All They Had Was Hank • colin dunne

Bibliography

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94

Rosalind Bliss, ‘Ducks and Daffodils’

Our bookshop can obtain any of the books mentioned in this issue.

Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road, 123 Gloucester Road, London sw7 4te, e-mail: enquiries@foxedbooks.com, tel: 020 7370 3503

4 From the Editors

Now the year has turned and spring bulbs are bravely poking up in Clerkenwell window-boxes, we’re looking forward hopefully, as well as looking back thoughtfully over the events of the past year, which was quite an adventurous one for SF.

The highlight, perhaps, was our first Readers’ Day, held in November at the Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury. It was a day that more than lived up to expectations. The setting – an elegant Georgian house which has been a home-from-home for craftsmen since the days of William Morris – felt perfect, spacious yet friendly. The day was packed in every sense and we were surprised and touched to learn of the distant places from which many people had travelled to be there, including the Isle of Wight and even the South of France. It was a great pleasure to see so many Slightly Foxed readers gathered together – a ‘fellowship of readers’, as Daisy Hay put it in the introduction to her talk on the early nineteenth-century circle who feature in her book The Young Romantics – and names were put to voices which had previously been heard only on the phone. The bookshop which Tony and Jane had set up was humming, and at teatime delicious cakes made by our versatile contributor Frances Donnelly were served. We enjoyed the whole thing hugely and are now planning another Readers’ Day this coming November.

In the autumn we also launched the first title in our new paperback series – Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School. We’d been thinking for some time of putting into paperback those Slightly Foxed Editions that have now sold out, and when the hardback of Mr Tibbits disappeared from the shelves in record time and

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