Meet the Boydell Team: Bonnie McGill

Our Meet the Boydell Team blog interviews continue! Today we introduce Bonnie McGill, Assistant Production Editor in the UK office.

What led you to your current role at Boydell & Brewer?

Chance encounter on the internet.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a career in Pre-Press?

If you are not already, be either very good at keeping records, or else, have a fantastic mind-palace of a memory – it requires a lot of thought-juggling.

What’s the absolute best part of your job?

Reading new ideas.

What’s the best day you’ve ever had at work?

Trick question? Seeing the file copies of books come in is always good.

What’s the view from your desk?

Sky – there are High Windows (Philip Larkin, I’m borrowing from you) so this is all I can see (of the outside world). 

What’s the best thing on your desk?

In the morning – coffee.

What are you currently reading?

Couple of things…Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Eugenia Cheng’s Beyond Infinity, E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art I have been re-visiting on and off, although I feel as though art stops for him when it starts for me…Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, illustrations by Dalí. There is a connection for all of these (excepting Vanity Fair, although, considering there is a chapter in which Thackeray plays about with time-frames and authorial power, maybe not?) been thinking about formulations of infinity in art and children’s literature and the (im)possibility of its representation.

What’s your beverage of choice?

Very much depends on the time of day, and crucially which day.

What’s one Boydell book that you’ve worked on?

British Art and the East India Company.

If you could choose a book for us to publish on ANY subject, what would it be?

I feel as though the artist Xavier Cortada needs to get together with Caro Rovelli and produce something which plays around with perspectives on time in Quantum Mechanics.

What’s your favourite historical novel, film or play?

Tough one; Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was I think the trippiest book I’ve ever read.

Photo author’s own

You can choose up to four people from history to join your dinner party: who are they?

Faraday – he ‘invented’ the electromagnetic field without mathematics (Maxwell then formalized his work), which I think is just incredible; I’d love to know more about Faraday’s thought processes. Jane Austen – her social satire is always devastatingly sharp. J. M. W. Turner – strapping yourself to a mast in a storm in the name of art deserves a dinner, and I think Erik Satie, since his Gnossiennes are beautiful and my own attempts at playing these are most probably damning (fortunately I play when no-one’s around).


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