According to the MHRA Style Guide, this item should be cited in a bibliography as follows:

Aubert, Nathalie, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Patrick McGuinness (eds). 2007. From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making (Legenda)

This is in the author-date variant of MHRA style. MHRA's journals don't allow author-date citation, but some of its book series (notably Legenda) do: please talk to your editor before using this. (To see the demonstration for regular style instead, follow this link.)

Let's take this bibliography entry one step at a time:

Step 1. The entry begins with the author(s) or editor(s) of the volume, with the first name inverted into Surname, Forename. This is because a Bibliography is a list in surname order, so we need a surname up front.

Aubert, Nathalie, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Patrick McGuinness

Step 2. If somebody has a role other than that of author, it goes next, in brackets. One editor becomes '(ed.)', two or more '(eds)'. (Remember: 'ed.' stands for 'editor', not 'edited', so the full stop must be used, because 'd' is not its last letter.)

Aubert, Nathalie, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Patrick McGuinness (eds)

Step 3. Now a full stop, the year of publication, and another a full stop:

Aubert, Nathalie, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Patrick McGuinness (eds). 2007.

Step 4. Here we have the book's title, in italics, not quotation marks.

Aubert, Nathalie, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Patrick McGuinness (eds). 2007. From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making

Step 5. Since this is a book, not a journal issue, we have to identify its source, in round brackets. Until 2024, MHRA style required a place of publication - for example, New York or Oxford. This is no longer given except in special circumstances.

Aubert, Nathalie, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Patrick McGuinness (eds). 2007. From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making (

Step 6. Now a colon, a space, and the publisher's name. Here that's Legenda because this is the imprint name under which the book is published, even though Legenda is not strictly speaking a company. To decide these things, one must look at the exact wording of the preliminary pages. Our preference is for Legenda books to be cited as 'Legenda', and we word our preliminaries with that aim.

Aubert, Nathalie, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Patrick McGuinness (eds). 2007. From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making (Legenda

Step 7. Since we had the date of first publication up front, we don't need it here, so we're done with the bracketed part.

Aubert, Nathalie, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Patrick McGuinness (eds). 2007. From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making (Legenda)

And that's the finished bibliography entry. Note that there's no final full stop.

So how about citations in the main text, or in footnotes or endnotes?

The advantage of the author-date system is that these are very concise. In fact, you don't need a note at all. Suppose we quote from page 21:

The author reminds us of Shakespeare’s view: ‘Better a foolish wit than a witty fool’ (Aubert, Fraiture, and McGuinness 2007: 21).

And notes are concise too. There's no difference in how to treat the first and subsequent notes.

³⁴ Aubert, Fraiture, and McGuinness 2007.

So is author-date easier than regular MHRA style? Not always. Firstly, it may not be allowed by your editor, so check before using. But secondly, it makes books easier to write, but only at the cost of making them harder to proof-read. If you discover at the last moment that Blenkinsop 1996 was actually published in 1995, that can mean hundreds of corrections to make, and it gets worse if an author has many publications in the same year, because Blenkinsop 1996e and Blenkinsop 1996d are easy to confuse.