Words and music are the recurrent themes in Simon’s life. He studied German and Russian, followed by Lexicography, at the University of Exeter, and was a choral scholar at the Cathedral there. After a brief spell working at OUP on the third edition of the Oxford Russian Dictionary (it is thanks to Simon that the Russian for ‘bouncy castle’ was included), he became an antiquarian bookseller. Then, after almost a dozen years in the London book trade, he set up on his own in 2010, and two years later was included among the winners of the Smarta 100 Awards for ‘the most resourceful, original, exciting small businesses in the UK’. Simon is also a literary translator, and composer. His “brilliant new translation” (NB Magazine) of Friedo Lampe’s At the Edge of the Night was published by Hesperus Press in 2019 and his choral music has been performed in both the UK and the USA, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3.