Our annual Studio Sale, so-called for historical reasons though it has long outgrown our studio, will take place tomorrow. As usual there will be glorious bargains to be had. Our doors will open at noon and there’ll be twinkly lights and mulled wine to warm and cheer you, as well as a year’s worth of accumulated seconds, experiments, mistakes, off-cuts, bin-ends, disasters, slightly dinged-up trays and boxes, damaged patterned paper, mislabelled notebooks, photograph albums with slightly dodgy spines, posters, cards, garlands, scraps of ribbon, textile experiments, ancient samples and very slightly damaged articles in need of a good home. We enjoy this event so much, and for us it signals the beginning of Christmas. Do join us!

The venue is the Unitarian Church Hall on Emmanuel Street in central Cambridge, which is just a few steps from the bus station and five minutes from the market, and easily accessed from the railway station as well. It is a old-style church hall, with a high vaulted ceiling, a piano, a little stage for putting on amateur dramatics, earnest maxims and biographies of notable Unitarians on the walls, a kitchen with utilitarian crockery, industrial-scale hostess trolley and giant tea urn, and a not-unpleasant smell compounded of rich tea biscuits, medicated soap and ancient ballet shoes. In fact, the attempt to learn to dance in this hall is an experience common to most of us at Cambridge Imprint. Scottish dancing, tango, tap or ballet: we nearly all either enjoyed/suffered through lessons here, or caused our offspring to, or both.

CAMBRIDGE IMPRINT STUDIO SALE

TUESDAY 9 DECEMBER 2025

NOON —4PM

UNITARIAN CHURCH HALL

5 EMMANUEL ROAD

CAMBRIDGE CB1 1JW

If you’ve been to the sale before you’ll know that there’s no possibility of pausing for refreshment in the first manic hour or so. But once the dust settles a bit at around one o’clock we’ll get out the afore-mentioned hostess trolley. As well as home-made mince pies we’ll be serving cheesy biscuits with our mulled wine this year. Nora Ephron says in Heartburn (one of the Great Books) that you remember most reliably anyone who ever gave you a good tip in the kitchen. Her example is a boyfriend who told her to get the fat really hot before you put the mushrooms in the frying pan, and give them enough space. This is good advice, and therefore she remembers him whenever she fries mushrooms, which is often. (The boyfriend who taught her to put raisins in rice pudding she never thinks of at all, because it’s a terrible idea and she never does it.) A dear friend of mine died this year, and I am adding her excellent cheesy biscuits to my Christmas repertoire, so that she will leap unbidden to my mind as often as possible. They are tiny, savoury, friable morsels of deliciousness, and here is the recipe:

RACHEL’S BISCUITS

Grate 100g of frozen butter into 100g plain flour and add 100g grated cheese (half parmesan and half cheddar), a pinch of cayenne pepper, half a heaped teaspoon of mustard powder, and a pinch of salt if there is no salt in the butter. Mix by hand for minute or so until a dough forms. (Or if you have a food processor you can just blitz the ingredients in that with no need to either freeze or grate the butter. But make sure the butter is cold.) Form the dough into a log or a brick with a cross section about 3 centimetres across. Wrap in clingfilm and chill in the fridge for an hour or until pretty firm.

With a sharp knife cut the log into slices 2mm think. Lay the slices on baking parchment on a baking tray about 2cm apart. Brush with beaten egg and sprinkle with grated parmesan. Bake in a preheated oven at 180 degrees C for 12–15 minutes. Cool on a wire rack in a distant room to prevent yourself accidentally eating the whole batch in a spirit of disinterested enquiry about how they turned out.

If you are still in need of Christmas items, we are open online. We have all sorts of good ideas for Christmas presents and you can see some suggestions below. We can even do your gift wrapping for you. To be confident about receiving your parcel before Christmas, please place your order by midnight on Wednesday 17 December. Due to volume of orders at this time of year it takes us about three days to get the items into the box, and the couriers and Royal Mail are currently not able to adhere to their overnight delivery window either. So you need to assume at least a four-day delivery time, wherever you are in the UK or the US, and a week is safer. For other international destinations we are passing the last posting day now. In extremis, consider the gift voucher…