“The book itself a curious artefact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”

Ursula Le Guin said that. Being very much of the same mind, we are happy that our image of the Fox in Winter is adorning the cover of this winter’s Slightly Foxed, the ‘real reader’s quarterly’. We have long been fans of (and indeed subscribers to) this beautifully produced publication in which four times a year a host of interesting people reveal their love for a book of their choosing: sometimes merely old; sometimes obscure; occasionally completely but undeservedly forgotten. It is a great treat to read a good writer minutely describing the texture and significance of a book you know and love. (Sam Leith on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King in this edition is an example of this for me. And he in turn quotes Ursula Le Guin, who was clearly an exceptionally wise woman: “I have laughed at White’s great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life.”) But it is equally fascinating to read someone extolling the virtues and idiosyncrasies of a book that has lived vividly in their imagination for decades, which you’ve never even heard of. Often this feels like a recommendation from a friend whose judgement you really trust, and I have found many new treasures this way.

Four times a year is just the right frequency of publication: they don’t plop onto the mat too often, rather, you’re just beginning to feel a build-up of impatience. The quarterly itself is beautifully printed, on smooth cream paper in an excellent font, with generous margins but not affectedly so, usually with rather a good image on the cover. (Particularly right now, obvs.) Slightly Foxed also publish their own editions, which as well as invariably being an excellent read, are books which perfectly conform to Le Guin’s ideal, being exceedingly neat, compact, and pleasant to look at and handle, rather like the World’s Classics editions which one should always buy whenever ones sees them. The list is composed of memoirs, and recently several of us have especially enjoyed Ysenda Maxtone-Graham’s hilarious Terms and Conditions (memories of girls’ boarding schools up to the adoption of the duvet), Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year (managing the irascible, deaf, most important client at a prestigious but antiquated New York literary agency in the nineties), and Geoffrey Wellum’s First Light (youngest Spitfire pilot to have fought in the Battle of Britain describes in exhilarating and horrifying detail the summer of 1940).

Subscribers to the quarterly get discounts on the editions, as well as at various partner organisations such as membership of the London Library. To celebrate our image being on the cover, Slightly Foxed are offering our customers £10 off the annual subscription of £56 with use of the code CAMBRIDGE10 at checkout. You will find them at https://foxedquarterly.com/. We cannot recommend highly enough!

Another technology for the preservation of memories which requires no expensive device, source of electricity, or monthly subscription is the photograph album. Instead of maintaining forever a library of thousands of pictures you never look at, at considerable cost to yourself and the planet, and in a form that could at any moment be mined by tech giants who do not necessarily have your best interests at heart, how about instead you choose a few really great pictures, print them out and store them in physical form? Our album maker closed their doors last year, to our distress, and you may have noticed our supplies dwindling steadily to a last few. Happily we have at found an alternative bookbinder, and as of this week we have new portrait-format albums available in twelve different designs. Each has 60 ivory pages, interleaved with tissue, properly sewn and bound with patterned covers and a robust coordinating book cloth spine. They make absolutely excellent Christmas presents.

On the subject of Christmas: it is coming! Here in Cambridge this morning there is a hard frost and winter seems truly to have arrived. Our Christmas shop is now open and utterly filled with goodies, but they’re selling fast. There are many new things, including these Coronets to complement last year’s Crowns: slightly less lofty and therefore easier to post, just as magnificent.

Our crackers have arrived and are selling fast. We make just 300 boxes a year and at the time of writing we have 140 boxes left. This year the crackers are a rich range of seasonal reds, deep pinks and purples. Each contains a gold crown; an exclusive Weird Words game (new Words are dreamt up for us every year by a Cambridge boffin); and one of the following genuinely desirable gifts: a packet of our extremely useful self-adhesive bordered labels; a vintage-style glass bauble with antique sari tie; an assortment of tiny origami patterned papers together with instructions for making a small bird; a packet of six pretty double-sided gift-tags with a skein of matching cotton twine ; a skein of vintage-style floppy ribbon in shades of Crimson, Peacock or Indigo blue; or a printing block in our new star design for 2025.

Your reward for being the generous purchaser of these crackers is, as always, ending up the possessor of the Box. This year’s elegant yet sturdy crimson-lined box is covered in Small Ivy Stripe patterned paper in the bright Red colour way, and it’s highly decorative and extremely useful afterwards for storage.

Our new Garland of Rowan and Robins is now in stock. Eight three dimensional card robins and six sprigs of rowan which you pop out and string together yourself to make about three metres of very charming bunting.

It’s become ruinously expensive to send presents overseas so we have created a set of extremely special triptych cards that will evade import tariffs and incur only postage rates for a letter, but nevertheless make the recipient feel fully appreciated and remembered with a card that can be kept for years as a Christmas mantelpiece ornament. Here you see Hidden Winter Bird on the left and Choir of Angels on the right.

And of course we are fully stocked with patterned paper for wrapping, a delicious variety of ribbons, gift cards, labels, paperchain, Christmas printing blocks and inks, as well as slightly more ordinary Christmas Cards including Fox In Winter and this year’s new additions to our Twelve Days of Christmas series. (We’re up to Five Gold Rings and Six Geese A-Laying.)

Finally, our 2025 sale of seconds, experiments, orphaned oddments and damaged and discontinued stock is coming up:

Tuesday 9 December

Noon – 4 pm

Unitarian Church Hall

5 Emmanuel Road

Cambridge CB1 1JW

As usual we’ve been having an end-of-year sort out of the attic, the studio and the warehouse: rummaging through heaps, bundles and boxes of experiments, disasters, slightly dinged-up trays and boxes, damaged patterned paper, mislabelled notebooks, discontinued scrapbooks, photograph albums with slightly dodgy spines, posters, cards, garlands, scraps of ribbon, textile experiments and ancient samples. It’s a glorious jumble that must be banished so that new things can be accommodated. None of it can be sold in the ordinary way as every item is different (we extend our heartfelt apologies to those who cannot attend in person — for this reason we just aren’t able to run this event online) but it all has potential and we very much do not want it to end up in a skip.

We’ll be selling it all off at bargain prices, and more will be coming out at intervals. Business is usually pretty brisk when we open at noon, but there will still be many bargains to be had later in the day, so please consider coming in the afternoon so that you can browse in a gentler and more contemplative environment, sipping your mulled wine and nibbling your mince pie. However, we will be closing a bit earlier this year (four o’clock instead of six) because last year we were utterly sold out, not one skerrick remaining, by then. We look forward to seeing you on this, our favourite day of the working year.