Simon Davies
@simonfd
Publishing Manager, @themhra.bsky.social Co-editor of the MHRA Style Guide Posting about scholarly publishing • History and future of the book • Book design, typography, typesetting 📚 Also work on the history of witchcraft & magic 🌒 Views here my own
'Every reader will find titles he has been looking for' I'd love to see one of these 'illustrated folders'! Random House Modern Library in-book ad, 1950
And a spread from the magnificent Bremer Presse edn of Andreas Vesalius's book of anatomy (1934 [1543]) #bookdesign #typography
Pages from the Bremer Presse edn of Francis Bacon's essays (1920). Bremer Presse was a German private press operating from 1911 to 1939 #bookdesign #typography
Blake was truly ahead of his time; here's his depiction of England captain Harry Kane as Christ
Narrative of a maritime disaster from 1840, bound in timbers from the wreck -- feels like this should be in a museum! (via @wisdompedlars.bsky.social) www.ebay.co.uk/itm/80016131...
Visitor's guide to Brighton from 1800: 'one of the most desirable summer and winter residences in the kingdom' And best mutton in the universe, apparently. archive.org/details/brig...
Complaint about 'stupid' scholarly titles that don't describe a work's contents, from a 1966 MLR review of the latest vol. of the Annual Bibliography of Eng Lang & Lit. Can't say I disagree, and it hasn't gone away 🙃
So Adobe has finally found a way to poison InDesign, one of their best bits of software, with 'AI' shite. It's a typesetting program, not a writing program. Anyone doing writing in InDesign is nuts. What a waste of everybody's time (and a waste of our absurdly inflated subscription money)
A layout choice I’ve never seen before: combined contents and explanatory notes(?!) You’ve got to put them somewhere I guess… (From Poetry of Nature, 1790) #bookdesign
Reading my book 📖 (While people are trying to get in) (From Le Livre Jehan Boccace, de Calcald, des Cas des nobles hommes et femmes, 15th C)
Absolutely gorgeous edn of Les Mis in the BL shop (Union Square/Hachette). Love the decoration style. Renaissance/Rogers-esque without being pastiche. Not a great photo, sorry 😔 I didn’t buy it, I don’t think this is a book I will ever read again. Kinda regretting it now though 😔📕
Picked up a bunch of Poul Anderson paperbacks at the £1 book sale last weekend. This guy could really crank ’em out 📚
Had to dig out my old BL card to renew it so why not take the opportunity to reminisce over my old library card collection from my doctoral days 📚 (Embarrassing headshots hidden)
The Nonesuch Press edn of Donne’s love poems (1923), printed in the Fell types #typography #bookdesign archive.org/details/love...
I thought it was only black metal bands and tattoo artists that used blackletter type in all caps, turns out they did it in the eighteenth century too! #Typography
Decorated initial designed by Aubrey Beardsley, in an edition of Ernest Dowson's 'The Pierrot of the Minute' (L. Smithers, 1897) Wish we had a whole alphabet of these! #bookdesign #typography
Candid footage captured of me preparing to ask authors to cut their discursive footnotes #editing
Book design really lost its mind in the 19th century (Type specimen from 1830) #typography