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The Journal of The Masonic Society
by Michael R. Poll, FMS
In 2008, the premiere edition of the Journal of the Masonic Society was released. The Journal was a new, shiny publication that followed the new, shiny Masonic Society. Our first President was Roger VanGorden and our Editor in Chief was Chris Hodapp. We hit a clear home run in both the Journal and the society itself. We were new, fresh, and very different.
From the beginning, the Journal was designed to be (in the words of Roger VanGorden) the “Time Magazine” of Masonic publications. We publish a blend of scholarly papers and educational/engaging nonacademic papers. We want papers that benefit, enlighten, challenge, and inspire you. We are very open to new ideas for papers. We will (and have) published first time authors side by side with some of the bright lights of Masonic literature.
I am delighted with the number of quality papers that we are receiving. But, we are beginning to have a problem with the formatting of a number of the papers sent in to us. We publish papers in a style used by general interest magazines. The papers must be easy to read and follow. The formatting that we need (especially the citation of notes) is simple and given in the Submission Guidelines on our website. In fact, I’m reprinting the guidelines below. Please read the guidelines as well as the papers published in the Journal before submitting papers. If helpful, you can also look up the Chicago Manual of Style and generally use that formatting. We want the Journal to be easy to read, uniform in presentation and pleasing to the eye and mind.
We want and need good papers. Please read our guidelines, follow them, and send us your papers.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Needs:
We are looking for solid Masonic educational or historical works; interesting new takes on old Masonic philosophical, ritualistic or membership themes; unique papers on leadership or lodge improvement or photo essays of any interesting Masonic subject. We are also interested in well written papers on any of the related esoteric/metaphysical subjects. In short, if your paper grabs the reader in the first few lines, we are interested.
What To Send:
E-mail your paper to editor@themasonicsociety.com. Printed submissions sent via postal mail will not be considered unless you have contacted us first.
Submissions need to be in Microsoft Word. Keep the formatting basic. Use end notes, not footnotes. Do not use headers or footers other than page numbers. Do not include any special formatting. Keep the text as simple as possible. Do not use paragraph formatting in your document, simply double space for a paragraph break. Use single space, not double space for the text.
It is OK to use italics or bold text if necessary. In citing publications, use italics and not underline text.
Include a short author bio. and photograph.
Submitting Images
If you have images or illustrations (we encourage them), send them separately from the text file. Do NOT embed images in your Word file. In the text, use brackets around an image place holder. For example: [insert “image #1” here] The image file should contain an image by the same name (image #1.). We will then know which image to place in the area held by the place holder. Due to the nature of text and the size of both the image and the columns, we cannot guarantee exactly where the image will fall in the text.
Images should be no less than 300 dpi. If you find an image on the internet, it will likely be 72 dpi – that means poor quality for printing. If you increase the dpi of an image from a low resolution (dpi) to a larger one, you will not be increasing the quality. You will only be making a poor-quality image larger. If the image you send is of a quality that will not reproduce well, we may not use it. If you have questions, write us.
Rights
Each issue of the Journal is under a collective copyright by The Masonic Society. Authors own all rights to their work. Authors grant to the Journal first publication rights. Do not submit papers to us that have been published elsewhere, or which you are simultaneously submitting to others for publication, without first letting us know. Do not submit anything to us that is under copyright to anyone else without first letting us know and without YOUR obtaining all permissions to use the work in the Journal. If you have questions, write us.