It’s all systems go at Foggie Toddle Books at the moment. It’s wonderful to see so many visitors to Wigtown and the shop. Really good to hear so many kind words about how lovely the shop is. We’ve had a few changes around partly to help customers feel safe by being able to distance, but some of the moves have been to improve the look of the shop and emphasise our focus on providing a good range of quality children’s books. We finally got rid of the big card display that had dominated the front of the shop for some time. There are so many shops in Wigtown now offering greetings cards that we wanted to change our focus to providing lovely and distinctive cards that fit with our aim of supporting local or independent producers. Keeping up with book sales is proving quite a challenge but we have fabulous publishing reps who have been very supportive and helpful – particularly those from Nosy Crow, Pan Macmillan, Walker Books and Lomond.
On the publishing side we’ve got some VERY exciting news that’s still under wraps for the moment but instead we’ll tell you about The Castle Cat which is hopefully in the final stages of production. Caroline Smith of Galloway Arts has been preparing the layout and design of the book which has words by Alasdair Hutton and illustrations by William Gorman. Will is just completing the fabulous watercolour pictures and they’ll be slotted into the layout in the next week. We’re hoping to launch in late August. Alasdair was the Voice of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo for almost 30 years and is also the author of the book The Tattoo Fox. A cat who lives at Edinburgh Castle featured in the story and after working with Alasdair on his first picture book Mustard & Pepper, Jayne, the owner of Foggie Toddle Books had the idea of telling the origin story (as they say in the comic book world) of this cat. The result is The Castle Cat. Here’s a photo of Will working on the detail of the cover image.
The cover of The Castle Cat takes shape.