James Currey Edited Collections Guidelines

Find a complete guide to Edited Collections here.

The role of the editor is to edit, not just compile. Editors are responsible for maintaining consistency throughout a collection, for producing a clean hard copy, for ensuring that electronic files match the submitted text, and for delivering a complete final manuscript.

These notes should be read in conjunction with our Guide for James Currey Authors and the Boydell & Brewer house style notes, but the main points are as follows.

1. Editors must maintain consistency of spelling and punctuation (either American or British), style of referencing and footnoting, numbering of illustrations and tables, and style of chapter titles and A, B, and C heads throughout the ms.

2. Please send your final text to us on a hard copy print-out and on disk following the guidelines below. You must ensure that the disk and hard copy sent are exactly the same in content. Making last minute changes on the disk but not the print-out inevitably leads to confusion later. Always keep a photocopy, or disk copy, of the manuscript for yourself.

3. Submit only the final versions of chapters. Please do not dribble in different versions of texts and illustrations. This only increases the chance that the wrong one will be printed.

4. The hard copy print-out of all the text

  • Double spaced, one uniform font size, single sided only, on white paper, loose leaf (this applies to footnotes and bibliographies as well as the main text).
  • Number all pages consecutively throughout the manuscript, not chapter by chapter. 
  • Include a table of contents that lists all chapters and illustrations.
  • Divide your headings into categories A, B, C etc. depending on their importance, and make an easily recognizable distinction of style between them.
  • Footnotes must be printed out separately from the main text, either at the end of each chapter or at the end of the ms. They should not be printed at the foot of each page.
  • Maps, Photos, Tables, Diagrams, Boxes and any other illustrations should be numbered throughout the book by chapter (Table, Fig. or Figure 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 etc.). Please use Map/Photo/Fig./Figure/Table consistently.
  • Please supply a separate list of captions for all illustrations, tables and diagrams. Informative captions are essential and can help to sell the book.

5. Electronic files on CD

  • Give each chapter a separate file.
  • Give each file an obvious name – e.g. Chapter One – nothing too cryptic!
  • Submit separate electronic files for any digital artwork or artwork produced on special programmes (such as excel), labelled according to the corresponding number of the illustration in the text.

6. Artwork

  • Keep all original artwork together leaving photocopies in place in the text.
  • Submit a separate hardcopy of all artwork (photos, maps, tables, graphs, charts, figures). Do not embed them in the text. 
  • Editors are responsible for making sure that all necessary permissions have been obtained to reproduce artwork from other sources.