Profile avatar
simonfd.bsky.social
Publishing Manager, @themhra.bsky.social Scholarly publishing • History of early modern witchcraft & magic • History and future of the book • Book design & typography 📚 Views here my own
347 posts 533 followers 350 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 23 Comments 27

An XXX query for #earlymodern ists: what does 'perform nature' refer to in a sexy context? Is it 'getting it up' or 'finishing'? Gaskill says both, but it's in a context in which the woman says she slept w a man but *didn't know* if he 'performed nature' or not, so surely not the first of those?

submitted 12 hours ago • 0 comments

📢📢📢We have just signed a new volume for our 'Critical Texts' series, coming in spring 2027! 'Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Lettres de mistriss Fanni Butlerd. A bilingual edition', edited and translated by Marijn S. Kaplan and Karen Santos da Silva. 👉 www.mhra.org.uk/publications...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Ed gets across exactly how I feel reading the never-ending blogs about how ‘AI’ will change scholarly publishing, without ever – ever – giving one specific, practical, useable example

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

‘When will everybody start accepting that the things that AI companies are saying have absolutely nothing to do with reality? […] Isn’t it strange that despite all of their money and power they’re yet to make anything truly useful?’ www.wheresyoured.at/longcon/

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

This month's edition of well-designed journal covers is a long-term classic, The Library from @bibsoc.bsky.social: a simple layout in a beautiful typeface that gets all the necessary information across. No bold anywhere in sight. Plus a cute cul-de-lampe for the journal subtitle. #scholarlyjournals

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

I really hate this new trend in software (especially Microsoft and Adobe) where the options are 'yes' or 'later' to a feature you don't want: never 'no'. They think they know us better than we know ourselves.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

'Ending Modern Languages at Cardiff would be a colossally short-sighted & counter-productive move. Wales has a proud record of commitment to linguistic pluralism, & the excellent work of Modern Languages at Cardiff is a critically important contribution to that. Please rethink urgently.' Sign here 👇

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

A group of scholcomm community members, responding to the Trump administration’s moves curtailing academic freedom of speech & inquiry, now shares this Declaration To hashtag#DefendResearch Against US Gov Censorship. Sign & join us in action! #HigherEd #academicsky docs.google.com/document/d/1...

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

Do you put your title in your email signature? I always feel a bit jerky using it when it's not asked for, but then I also get mildly irritated when it's not used. (Especially now as I'm not in an academic post, so people often assume I don't have an academic background)

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

There are two senior publishing staff at the MHRA, one for our scholarly editions imprint (me) and another for our monograph imprint. Both of us agree that Volume 4 is the superior Black Sabbath album, so you know you're in good hands.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

‘The “old” traditional print sales model for books was actually a pretty good way to fund publishing, spreading costs among many libraries that each bought individual single copies.’ – who’dve thought it?! 😕 insights.uksg.org/articles/10....

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

Just imagining how much more relaxing my life would be if I could get a lump sum of £20K for each single book I published... 🥲

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

Please, if you're organizing a webinar, send out a reminder on the day, I simply will not remember otherwise

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

I learned recently that some people think 'blurb' refers to a review quote on the cover, rather than the summary of the book on the back cover/front flap, which is what I've always thought. The latter is what Hugh Williamson says though, so I'm sticking to it 📘

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

I'm working on blurbs today: medieval Welsh to Finnish decadence to 18th-C France – my brain doing handbrake turns between completely different historical contexts 🙃

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

Gaskill concludes: ‘Without peace and prosperity, liberty and welfare, and the political and economic stability on which those things depend, the thinking of the next generation in the West might swerve off in an altogether more mystical and malevolent direction.’ Published in 2005…

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

I find it particularly evocative because I grew up in East Anglia and my family are in Suffolk in the midst of where it happened. I know those bleak, witch-haunted fens well 🧙‍♀️

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

Re-reading Malcolm Gaskill’s book about the Matthew Hopkins witch-hunt, which I first read many years ago. Still a masterful work of history, accessible enough to be pop history yet based on deep archival research. Seriously depressing though. m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61M...

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

Needed to remind myself about a reprint but autocorrect misspelled it for me, so I briefly had an entry on my to-do list that just said 'repent'

submitted 19 days ago • 2 comments

Zero-trurst authiection?

submitted 21 days ago • 1 comment

So potentially some lost works of literature to be found? Very exciting. Though if they’re using ‘AI’ to help read them they’ll no doubt be riddled with ‘furthermore’, ‘in this context’, ‘noteworthy’, etc.

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

The Manchester Spenser (?) series has a very nice text-only cover design (I'm particularly fond of those, and I enjoy a good type ornament too) #bookdesign #typography

submitted 22 days ago • 1 comment

The Arts and Humanities Alliance have written an open letter to Bridget Philippson, Secretary of State for Education, on the recently announced cuts across the sector. We are concerned that these measures disproportionately affect our disciplines and call for an urgent government review.

submitted 23 days ago • 3 comments