The relationship of Oliver Simon to Signature was special. He retained the ownership of the title personally, thus being not only its Editor but also its Designer, Printer and Proprietor. He also contributed some articles himself, mainly in preparing his autobiography.
Series I has been described earlier (at Rm1-Rm15). Harley (Harley 1970 p.21) says that 'as planned [this] ended after fifteen issues in December 1940', but shares no evidence with us. Oliver Simon's editorial note (ZDm1 p.3) in the first issue of Series II states instead that publication was suspended because of the start of World War II.
A 'name-index' to all of Series I was printed by Oliver Simon (Simon 1956 p.141-7) in his autobiography.
No separate index has been available hitherto, though issue 15 (May 1952) contains an index for issues 1-15, and issue 18 (Feb 1954) one for 16-18. Indeed these indexes appearing may be read as evidence that Oliver, with his health failing, felt that the sequence might soon end.
My entries for Series II, now available on-line, still need completing. Contents lists are shown for all 18 issues, but details of Collation and Paging are only shown as yet for issues 1 (1946) and 16-18(1952-4).
Surprisingly, Oliver often omitted authors' names from his listings of books reviewed, so I have added these in notes. Through the main Name Index you can now search under the Authors, Subjects etc. of the articles and books reviewed.
A noticeable feature of the articles and of the books reviewed is the number of foreign-language items, or books focussed on overseas countries, so for clarity I have added notes [in square brackets as usual] by way of publication years, translation or explanation,
I shall be very grateful if any reader who spots errors or omissions remaining will use the link to the right of the Copyright symbol to report them directly to me so that I can attend to correcting them.