When I was in grad school, twelve years ago to the day, my thesis supervisor gave me a part-time job. He got me onto the editorial board of Swedish archaeology’s main research journal.

I became co-editor of Fornvännen on 15 April 1999. The other editors were pretty busy people, I was paid by the hour, I enjoyed the work and I saw the career potential. So I made sure from the start to grab all the responsibility I could. This state of affairs was formalised in 2008, when I was made Managing Editor, a box that hadn’t existed on the org chart before. I did the journal work in my research office until October 2006, when I got a desk at the Royal Academy of Letters and started to edit books for them as well. And since January 2009 my part-time position there has been a steady one.

Editing a major journal is an excellent side job for a research scholar. You get to know everybody in your field. You get to read everything a year before anyone else does, including lots of stuff that never gets published. (Fornvännen has a 1/3 refusal rate.) You learn endlessly about new subjects. And you become keenly aware of academic prose. I copy-edit everything in the journal pretty strongly, aiming for a clear, sparse, jargon-free, non-archaic style.

Since issue one in 1906, twenty people have been credited on the title page as Fornvännen’s editors. I’m number 18. The median number of volumes each editor has contributed to is 8.5. My friend Göran Tegnér leads the field, currently contributing to his 37th volume. The list below is however most likely not complete for the first decades, where only the Head Editor is credited. There must have been editorial secretaries back then, particularly under Sigurd Curman whose main job was as Custodian of Ancient Monuments.

1. Emil Ekhoff, vols. 1906-23
2. Sigurd Curman, vols. 1925-46
3. Mårten Stenberger, vols. 1947-52
4. Erik Bohrn, vols. 1953-65
5. Ulla Behr, vols. 1956-65, 1974-75
6. Gösta Selling, vols. 1961-65
7. Egon Thun, vol. 1966
8. Ingrid Swartling, vols. 1966-72
9. Bo Gräslund, vols. 1966-72, 1985-96
10. Åke Hyenstrand, vols. 1972-75
11. Lars. O. Lagerqvist, vols. 1972-75
12. Göran Tegnér, vols. 1975 onward
13. Ann-Cathrine Bonnier, vol. 1975
14. Jan Peder Lamm, vols. 1976 onward
15. Ingvar Jansson, vol. 1976
16. Torgny Säve-Söderberg, vols. 1976-85
17. Gustaf Trotzig, vols. 1997-2007
18. Martin Rundkvist, vols. 1999 onward
19. Elisabet Regner, vols. 2007 onward
20. Lars Larsson, vols. 2008 onward