Gail Pirkis and Hazel Wood, the co-founders of Slightly Foxed magazine, met as editorial colleagues at John Murray, where both had become disenchanted by the churn of big publishing houses: new crops of books, season after season. They started kicking around ideas to celebrate great books that had already been published, and in 2004, the first issue of Slightly Foxed appeared. It was a handsome, large-pocket-sized journal printed in Yorkshire, full of personal essays about old books - some funny, some tender, nearly all of them love letters.
Slightly Foxed contributors include authors, academics, and journalists, as well as people who have never been published. “They may have been hospital administrators or lawyers or teachers or whatever it may be, but they have it,” says Gail. “It’s hard to define what it is when you read a piece by somebody who’s a real writer, but you instantly know it, and finding those people widens our scope of interest”.
Over 22 years in business, subscriptions have grown steadily from around 600 to over 8,000, and Slightly Foxed now has a couple of other branches: a podcast that delves more deeply into the books written about in the magazine, and a traditional publishing arm that reissues beautiful, cloth-bound books that Gail and Hazel think deserve another airing. Still, the core objective is the same. “With each issue,” says Gail, “we try to produce something that’s interesting to read from cover to cover, and in which you might find three or four books you haven’t come across, and absolutely need to read.”
Gail spoke to me in Sussex over video from her home in Dartmoor, in the run-up to Christmas.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You may hear some thumping, Gail. A man is checking on the bats in our attic. Have you had bats in Dartmoor?
Oh yes, plenty of bats. We have bats, we have squirrels, we have mice. We’re in a house with a grass roof, built into the hill. We get slow worms in the summer and all sorts.
Slow worms?
They look like snakes, but they’re actually lizards. There are a lot of them around. Ecologically, they’re a great sign, but when it’s hot, they tend to slip into the house and give me a fright.
How long have you been living on Dartmoor, and how did you decide to build a house into a hill?
We’ve had the land for 30 years, I think, but we knocked down a house that was here before and rebuilt it. We’re in the national park, so it’s quite wild, and we wanted something that would sit properly in the landscape, rather than a traditional house.
Do people bring up hobbits a lot?
They do. It has been called a hobbit house by people. I’d say it’s not quite as burrow-like as that.
How often do you need to go into London, to oversee things at Slightly Foxed?
I probably go around eight times per year. We do our podcast recordings in the office, and then some meetings and so forth. But I’ve reached the stage where, as far as the day-to-day running of Slightly Foxed is concerned, I’m gradually handing things over to younger staff, and just focusing on the editorial side.
When we started, of course, we didn’t have any staff at all. We had Hazel, my fellow editor who lives in Highbury, London, and Steph, who does the marketing and lives in West Sussex. I basically answered the phone, wrapped the parcels, updated the database, et cetera. Now, as we’ve grown, I’m not allowed anywhere near the database.
Your professional background was in book publishing. How did you end up as the editor of a literary magazine?
Yes, Hazel and I both worked at John Murray for quite a long time. It was taken over by a much bigger company, the dynamics of it changed, and it seemed to us, at the time, that there was less focus on editorial, and more on sales and marketing. It just wasn’t for us. We spent about six months meeting and chatting about what else we might do.
And then I came up with the idea for the magazine, partly inspired by Susan Hill’s magazine, Books and Company, which didn’t run for very long, but was also a magazine about books. We did a business plan, raised money from shareholders, and then in November 2003 we suddenly had our funding. I rang Hazel up and said “We’ve got money in the bank! We better start working on the first issue.” The first issue came out in March 2004.
Back then, Waterstone’s was selling books “3 for the price of 2,” celebrity memoirs were in vogue, and it seemed to us that there was a lot of good literature on people’s backlists, all out of print, which was overlooked and worth reading. So we wanted to celebrate books that endure, which obviously includes the classics that everybody knows about, but also the many minor gems that might not have received the attention they deserved when they first came out, and haven’t gone onto people’s radars.
There’s a real mix of genres in the magazine too - fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, cookery, quite a lot of memoir, history, collections of letters - you know, the full range. Hazel always describes it as a bran tub. There’s a bit of everything in there.
To commission the first essays in the magazine, were you going around to writers who you know, and saying, could you please write about an overlooked book that you love? Presumably, having spent your careers in publishing, and around writers, was useful.
Yes, exactly that. I’ve been in book publishing all my working life, so I had quite a lot of authors to draw on. And in addition to publishing, Hazel had worked on the book pages of The Telegraph for quite a while, so we had a good range of people, journalists as well as authors.
We also paid people right from the beginning. We’ve never asked people to do things for free, or as a favour, because I think if you’re going to be a serious business, people need to be paid, and paid promptly, for what they do.
Some of the people who wrote for us at the beginning are still with us, and we have a stable of around 50 people who write for us regularly - maybe once a year. Then there are others who may only write one piece on a subject that happens to interest them. We also try very hard to include people who write really well, but aren’t necessarily professional writers.
Some of those are my favourite essays - the ones written by people who consider themselves readers, rather than writers, and who have a belter of a book recommendation to share.
Yes, me too. We’ve discovered quite a few contributors through writing competitions, and we’re running another one this spring. We basically invite people to write 1,500 words on a book of their choice, and every time we’ve run a competition, we have found a handful of really terrific people. For anyone who might want to enter, details will be on the website from the first of March, and the competition will also be announced in the newsletter.
Slightly Foxed is a book publisher now, too, as well as a magazine. When did that happen?
We’d been going for about four years, so 2008. If you’re a publisher, you have this itch that you have to scratch, really, to share books with people. We talked about it for quite a long time and came up with a shortlist of books that we knew were out of print, but we felt still deserved an audience.
The first one we did was Rosemary Sutcliff’s memoir, Blue Remembered Hills, which is a magical evocation of her, in many ways, quite difficult childhood. In it, you can see how she became the writer that she did. We’ve done 73 books now, and we publish one every quarter. This year, we reissued Nigel Slater’s memoir Toast, in a delicious toast-coloured binding. We also just published Les Girls by Constance Tomkinson, which is a very, very funny book about going to dance as a chorus girl in Europe just before the Second World War. Of course, this is 1937, 1938, so it’s very frothy on the surface, but it’s also a fascinating account of what life was like under fascism.
The memoirs are snapshots of people’s often very extraordinary lives. They’re all beautifully written, and it’s just such fun to give them a fresh outing with a new audience.
If someone is new to the Slightly Foxed roster of memoirs, are there a couple in particular you would recommend to kick things off?
Dorothy Whipple’s memoir, The Other Day. I think I got through the first ten pages before I rang Hazel and said, “This is an absolute gem.” You’re in safe hands, and it’s a joy of a book.
Then there’s Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece, which is an account of her childhood in Cambridge. She was a member of the Darwin family, and it’s a very funny snapshot of academic life. Oh, and My Grandmothers & I by Diana Holman-Hunt, who was looked after in her childhood and teens by her two grandmothers: one who lived in Sussex in a very comfortable country house with servants and all the luxuries and comforts that you could have, and another who was the widow of the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt, and who lived in a house in Kensington with cockroaches in the kitchen and hardly any heating. I give it to quite a lot of friends as they become grandmothers, because it’s just so funny.
Do you often get a chance to read purely for fun, nothing to do with the business?
I’m shamefully, shamefully badly read on anything contemporary. At the moment, I’m re-reading Patrick O'Brian’s books. You absolutely lose yourself in the world of the eighteenth-century and the Napoleonic wars, and life at sea and all the rest of it. I tend to read more new stuff when I’m on holiday and away from my desk.
Anything good lately?
Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter. And I loved The West Country Trilogy by Tim Pears.
Do you ever get to the end of the day and think to yourself, forget it, I can’t look at another book, I’m going to watch Slow Horses?
Well I love Slow Horses. Though I have, actually, read all of them, in addition to watching the show. Mick Herron has written for Slightly Foxed - a lovely piece on John Steinbeck. I’d love him to write something else, but we may have lost him to Hollywood.
We’re speaking a week or so before Christmas, and this interview will run between Christmas and New Year’s Day. What is this time of year like on Dartmoor?
It’s very rural. You know, there’s a carol service in the church and a Christmas tree on the green. I’ll be making turkey. Last year, my daughter and I rebelled. We were sick of turkey and made beef, which was delicious. But my son said he won’t come for Christmas unless the turkey returns. And every year I make two Christmas puddings, so we have one for this year, and another for next year.
Gail wears the TOAST Orla Donegal Wool Sweater and Gabi Pull On Trousers.
Words by Jo Rodgers.
Photography by Leia Morrisson.
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