We’ve been arranging appointments with carpet-fitters and awning-makers this month, and the builder is preparing his estimate for repairs and redecoration in the New Year. We’re also thinking of a nearer event and will be employing Jane and David’s skills in creating our Christmas window displays. As well as the two Christmas Foxes (see below),which make ideal stocking-fillers, we are introducing Gloucester Road to the delights of Lord Norwich’s Christmas Cracker (£6). This is a booklet he’s produced annually from his commonplace book since 1970. Meanwhile, large quantities of second-hand books continue to pour in and out of the shop, including a van load of 25 boxes and a library destined for China.
The Christmas Fox I
Ghost Writer, by Tim Mackintosh-Smith £5
Most readers of Slightly Foxed will be aware that books, as Milton put it, are not absolutely dead things. Few of us, however, realize quite how alive and talkative our libraries are. Ghost Writer is the voice of an insider, 800 years old but still going strong – an autobiography straight from the shelf. Speaking via its ghost-writer, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, the Arabic manuscript of Abd al-Latif’s Book of Useful Information and Admonition tells its own true, if admittedly incredible, story. Set in medieval Cairo and Aleppo, seventeenth-century Oxford and 1960s London, it is a tale of cannibalism, a curse, and an authorial voice from beyond the grave. Beautifully produced with decorations by David Eccles, Ghost Writer is a perfect, stocking-sized Christmas entertainment. It not only redefines the meaning of a talking book; it may even make us listen to our libraries.
The Christmas Fox II
The Reluctant Biographer, by Jeremy Lewis £5
When Jeremy Lewis was booted out of his comfortable job as an editor at Chatto & Windus he never imagined he would become a biographer. But a bibulous lunch with a friendly fellow publisher and former Olympic fencer set him on the path to a new career. As the authorized biographer of Cyril Connolly he soon found himself sitting at the bedside of the tetchy, pyjama-clad historian A. L. Rowse, helping Connolly’s wayward and flirtatious ex-wife Barbara Skelton move her cats and chattels home from France, and engaging in some delicate negotiations of a personal kind with Lord Weidenfeld.
Anyone who has read Kindred Spirits, Jeremy Lewis’s hilarious memoir of his time in publishing – or indeed his biographies of Connolly, Tobias Smollett and Allen Lane – will know that The Reluctant Biographer, an account of the pleasures and problems of his second career, will make for delightful winter reading.