Greetings from Cambridge, which has returned remarkably quickly to its comparatively verdant self after a summer in which it shrivelled for months in the merciless sun. Walking across the parks, usually such a pleasure, became a dangerous crossing of open, shadeless ground like the dried up plains of the Serengeti. The delicious soft grass became crispy, scratchy, dusty, somehow almost thorny and eventually vanished altogether. Many of the fruit trees with which Cambridge is blessed became visibly unhappy and dropped their fruit early to protect themselves from the drought. I would take the occasional detour past the Scott Polar Research Institute because just the idea of trackless snowy wastes was so soothing to the fractious spirit. Jack’s Gelato, our local maker of extremely delicious ice cream (may I recommend in particular the Roasted Banana flavour and also Guava Sorbet, but don’t count on either because the menu changes every day, which is one of the pleasures), was busy serving until 11 o’clock at night, every night. But happily a couple of weeks ago the thermometer dropped and the rain returned, and it turned out that the grass wasn’t dead after all. Gardens and hedgerows are full of the interesting seed heads of those plants that enjoyed the heat instead of finding it all too much. Just in time we have succeeded in producing Seed Envelopes, a long incubated plan. Also in this newsletter, our autumn calendar of events, including the date of this year’s December Studio Sale.

Saving seeds and taking cuttings are satisfyingly thrifty methods of propagating a particularly successful plant in one’s own garden. Pinching the same from someone else’s is a bit more problematic — though I feel my morals on this one becoming slightly laxer with time. My grandmother used to mortifyingly whip out scissors from some hidden place (in seconds — like a sharpshooter. I wonder about the mechanics of this now, when it’s too late to make enquiries) and make me stand in front of her as she surreptitiously snipped a seed-pod from someone’s front garden or even, God forbid, in the Botanical Gardens where such behaviour is literally and explicitly forbidden. (She was also a great one for wrapping any uneaten portions of a restaurant meal in a paper napkin and secreting them about her person for later, behaviour which was similarly wounding to youthful sensibilities and for which I also now have admiration. The American concept of the doggy bag had not yet crossed the Atlantic and at the time this was eccentric in the extreme.)

I digress. Saving the seeds from your own garden is a sensible, thrifty and pleasing thing to do, and giving them away to friends and neighbours is a great pleasure. The better to encourage such virtue, we have created Seed Envelopes: a packet of eight small ‘pocket’ envelopes (that is, they are taller than they are wide) in a range of 14 appropriately herbaceous patterns, together with matching labels. They are ideal for saving your own seeds, and we think they also make a really nice present for any gardener in your life.

Speaking of presents, Christmas is inexorably coming, and a few charmingly packaged packets of your own seeds might make a very lovely gift. Although conceived of as Seed Envelopes, they could be put to other similar uses, being ideal for giving tiny objects like earrings or other jewellery—or even cash, that eccentric and ancient medium of exchange, beloved of older people.

Although not at all elderly, we at Cambridge Imprint confess to great nostalgia for cash, which we now rarely use except at the car boot sale. In fact this is one of the things that make a car boot sale so incredibly enjoyable—the straightforward exchange of my metal token for your unneeded or underappreciated object, each of the two participants in the exchange swapping a thing they have for another thing they want more, thus increasing the sum of human happiness, and with no giant tech firm skimming off a percentage on the deal, no data collected by anybody about anything, and no electricity supply, internet connection or worryingly intelligent device required. What pleasing simplicity.  Six months ago AI was predicted to steal all our jobs and that threat has escalated to the imminent annihilation of humanity. Will we have to turn everything off and start swapping cows for magic beans again? I feel there might be some upsides.

Strangely, the sign of AI-generated text is said to be the deeply suspicious use of the em-dash. You may have noticed that I often use the em-dash—here’s a couple, for example—and I am reluctant to give up this useful piece of punctuation in order to prove that I’m not a robot. The em-dash indicates parenthesis in a chattier way than brackets or movement to a new connected thought less stuffily than a colon. It has a totally different use to the en-dash (shorter—the length of an ‘n’ rather than an ‘m’—and used to denote range, as in ‘from 2–5’) and the hyphen (very short; sticks words together into compounds) and I need it. Reclaim the em-dash from the machines!

In other news: Heffers bookshop in Cambridge is 150 years old. Heffers is an absolutely indispensable Cambridge institution and naturally we have made some celebratory merch for them. The stout canvas shopping bag immortalises not only the river, bridges, punts and bicycles for which Cambridge is famous, but also the University Library which is generally considered to be fairly grim, architecturally speaking, but is utterly beloved of all scholars. (What is so crucial about the library is that it has open shelves. You can browse. It had a famous tea room frequented by wild eccentrics but alas that has been tidied up.) As well as the bag we have also made a two-colour print depicting the Heffers facade on Trinity Street, which you can see below. (There’s a tea towel in the same design coming soon.) They are available only in Heffers itself, except that we did keep a few of each to sell through here. If you are interested, you can find them by clicking on either image.

We’ll be in London at the Spirit of Christmas Fair for a week in November. It’s the 25th year of this autumn treat run by House & Garden magazine and anyone who has been before knows what fun it is: The Grand Hall at Olympia, in Kensington, including the gallery, is filled with 600 of the most enticing stalls selling things you won’t find on the high street and it’s possible to spend the entire day there, intently browsing, and getting a good head start on your Christmas shopping. Indeed, we are going with exactly this end in view. Selling our own wares, though fun, is a secondary consideration. Having said that, to make the stall extra-specially worth visiting, we are making all sorts of items for it that will not be available anywhere else, not even on our website.

Spirit of Christmas Fair

 2-8 November

Olympia, London

Olympia has been being redeveloped for several years and has been looking rather bedraggled. It’s finished at last, with the grand entrance reinstated and all sorts of restaurants and cafés up on the roof level, as well as the champagne bar and many food stalls inside the fair. The Fair runs 10 am to 6 pm from Monday 2  to Sunday 8 November, with a special late night opening (until 9pm) on the Thursday. If you’d like to visit you can book online now at a slightly reduced rate to the ticket price on the door. Better still: we have fifty pairs of tickets to give away, and they’ll go to the first fifty people who email us.

We’ll be back in London for the Selvedge Winter Fair on Sunday 22 November from 11-5. This event is an old favourite, invariably filled with a delicious array of mostly (though not exclusively) textile treasures: some vintage, some handmade by artisans, some a combination of the two. The venue is the Royal Horticultural Halls in Westminster. You can book online now by clicking on any of these images. We don’t at present have any free tickets to give away but if some do come our way we will certainly let you know.

Finally, our very own Studio Sale will be on Tuesday 8 December from midday to 4 pm. It’s in the usual venue, the Unitarian Church Hall in central Cambridge:

CAMBRIDGE IMPRINT STUDIO SALE

TUESDAY 8 DECEMBER 2026

NOON —4PM

UNITARIAN CHURCH HALL

5 EMMANUEL ROAD

CAMBRIDGE CB1 1JW

As usual, we will be selling off the seconds, experiments, discontinued lines and slightly damaged stock that has accumulated over the course of the year at extremely discounted prices, and serving mince pies and mulled wine. Do come and see us for a bewildering plenitude of indescribable bargains and a very friendly day.