Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (
OUP) is a highly-respected
publishing house and a department of the
University of Oxford in
England. It has branches all over the world including
India,
Pakistan,
Canada,
Australia,
New Zealand,
Malaysia,
Singapore,
Nigeria and the
Republic of South Africa. OUP
USA, established circa
1891 and incorporated in
1896, is a
private limited company affiliated to the parent body and was the Press's first international venture. The Indian Branch, set up in
1912, was the second. OUP as a whole is managed by a body of elected representatives called the Delegates of the Press, who are all members of
Oxford University. Today it has two main imprints: Oxford University Press, under which the bulk of its reference, educational, and scholarly publications appear, and the Clarendon Press, which is its 'prestige' scholarly imprint. Most of the major branches function as local publishers as well as distribute and sell titles from OUP headquarters.
As a department of a
charity, OUP is exempt from income tax and corporate tax in most countries, but may pay sales and other commercial taxes on its products. The Press today transfers 30% of its annual surplus to the rest of the University, with a commitment to a minimum transfer of £12 million per annum. OUP is the largest
university press in the world by the number of publications, publishing more than 4,500 new books every year and employing some 4,000 people. OUP publishes many reference, professional, and academic works including the
Oxford English Dictionary, the
Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the
Oxford World's Classics and the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A number of its most important titles are now available electronically in a package called "Oxford Reference Online", and are offered free to holders of a reader's card from many public libraries in the UK.
In 2003, OUP acquired from
Macmillan Publishers the
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the
Dictionary of Art. Of late, the Press has been acquiring specialty publishers such as
Oceana Publications. [
1] Unfortunately, some years ago it also closed down the much-loved
Oxford Poets series.
Books published by Oxford have
International Standard Book Numbers that begin with 0-19, making the Press one of a tiny number of publishers who have two-digit identification numbers in the ISBN system.
William Caxton established the first printing press in
England in
1476, following the invention of the
printing press by
Johann Gutenberg in
1450 and the subsequent spread of the technology across
Europe. Two years later, in
1478, the first book was printed in the city of
Oxford. This book caused something of a sensation among later historians as it carried the erroneous date of
1468, which would have placed it before Caxton in time. However its printing was only tenuously related to the existence of the university. For the next hundred years, books used by or produced for the
University of Oxford would be printed by a succession of local independent printers.
In
1586 a decree from the
Star Chamber granted the privilege to print books to an Oxford printer who claimed to have the favour of the university; this was at that time the only such license issued to a press outside London.
King Charles I increased the independence and latitude of the University Press when he entitled the University to print "all manner of books" by granting a
Great Charter to the University in
1632 (The
University of Cambridge received a similar charter at the same time.) The content of the charter was negotiated by
Archbishop Laud, at the time Chancellor of the University, as part of his drive to establish a set of statutes (the Laudian Code) that were to govern the running of the University for the next two centuries.
Delegates of the Press were briskly appointed from among the fellows of the university in
1633 to oversee the matters of this still theoretical entity, but in the absence of an actual press to print books on, the licence languished for a few more years. The Delegates appear to have met in 1668, but the lack of capital and enterprise stayed their hand and in
1672 the charismatic
John Fell,
Dean of
Christ Church and
Bishop of Oxford, leased the university's licence to print. Fell set about collecting sets of exotic and rare
type founts in
Hebrew,
Greek and other classical languages for his learned press which he housed on somewhat dubious authority in the environs of the
Sheldonian Theatre off Broad Way in Oxford. On his death in
1690 the press and its
furniture passed to the university, and with this there was at last the physical wherwithal to act on the charter to print books.
[Harry Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp 22-23.] The Press's initial fortunes were made on the publication in
1702 of the hugely popular (but historiographically suspect)
History of the Great Rebellion by the
Earl of Clarendon that charted the progress of the
English Civil War and
Oliver Cromwell's rule of the country, and the proceeds went to build the Press a permanent home, Clarendon House. Clarendon's name, too, came over time to be used, to the puzzlement of outsiders, for a variety of imprints and titles produced by the Press. The Press thus initially developed with two parts: the Learned (Clarendon) Press producing titles by scholars, and the
Bible Press, which was set up circa 1690 to print the
King James Bible first issued in
1611. The licence to print Bibles had been granted on paper to the King's Printers in London and by the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge. However, the Delegates of the Press at Oxford University soon found that catering to the enormous demand for Bibles was too exhausting for a group of scholars donating voluntary labour, and the privilege was leased out. In
1780, the bottom having fallen out of the American Bible market due to the
American War of Independence of
1775, the Delegates of the Press created forty two shares in the Bible privilege and farmed them out to a set of commercial printers in London. Much permutation and combination followed as the shares were subdivided and inherited by this motley crew, until in the 1880s the shares were once again brought under the university's control.
[Peter Sutcliffe, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) p. 16]From the
1850s onward the University of Oxford underwent a protracted and painful programme of modernisation, under the aegis of
William Gladstone among others. The Delegacy of the Press ceased to be ‘perpetual' in
1856. It now had five perpetual and five junior posts filled by appointment from the University, with the
Vice Chancellor a Delegate ex officio.
As the reform of the University got under way, the Delegates were split into two groups. One, epitomized by
Mark Pattison, a
classicist whom
Mrs Humphrey Ward once described as looking ‘like a discontented lizard with a cold',
[E. Huws Jones, Mrs Humphrey Ward, (London, 1973) quoted in Richard Symonds, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986) p. 10.] believed scholarship was the sole purpose for the Press's existence; the other, that of
Benjamin Jowett, saw it first as a commercial venture intended to sponsor the University's scholarly pursuits through selling books which the public were ready and willing to buy for hard cash. What was needed was a happy mean between these two, but the nature of the politics and the personalities involved meant that a
Manichaean opposition was perceived and fought out between the two camps in true epic style.
[Sutcliffe, OUP: An Informal History p. 16]The reformist group's first step was to appoint a
London agent to act for them in the business of selling books.
John Murray III declined, but
Alexander Macmillan, who had just moved to London from
Cambridge, agreed eagerly and was appointed around
1863.
Macmillan and
Bartholomew Price began between them to concoct a scheme to be known as the Clarendon Press series, a collection of schoolbooks meant to be cheap, elementary and profitable. This appears to have been thefirst major use of 'Clarendon' as an imprint, a surprising start to the style that became the Press's prestige scholarly flagship.
[Peter Sutcliffe, An Informal History of the OUP (Oxford: OUP, 1972). p. 24] Macmillan allowed the Press to take up the proposed New English Dictionary from the Philological Society, a prospective white elephant he did not regret, and he in turn got
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (
Lewis Carroll). The
New English Dictionary under the editorship of
James Murray finally appeared as the
Oxford English Dictionary, completed after much struggle in 1910, now the foundation of OUP's fortunes.
[See for example Simon Winchester, The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness, and the Love of Words (London: Viking, 1999).] The greatly enhanced volume of business produced by the Macmillan agency began to put pressure on the Oxford administration.
G.W. Kitchin, Secretary of both the School Book Committee and of the Board of Delegates as a whole, had no taste for the routine of office, and in 1868 he stepped down in favour of Bartholomew Price. Price declared that he was not to be the Delegates' clerk but their executive officer, and all the heads of the various departments, the Printing Works, the Bible Warehouse, the bindery and the
Wolvercote paper mill, were to report directly to him. He quickly acquired a reputation for moderation and level-headedness and had a knack for settling debate with a few well-chosen words. Factions had no effect on him, and even Mark Pattison, who was constitutionally disposed to dislike everybody, found him tolerable.
The association with Macmillan ended in 1880. This was part of Price's master plan to end all outside influence, including the Bible partnership, and bring all aspects of the Press's business more directly under the administration of the Delegates. He cast about for a suitable replacement and soon heard through the Bible trade grapevine that the contract of
Henry Frowde, the young assistant to a trader named Mr Stock, was about to expire, and that Frowde was looking for other employment. Stock in fact did business in the name of ‘Henry Frowde', so by the time Frowde came to the Delegates his name carried valuable goodwill in the Bible trade. Price dropped hints in the right places and on
5 February 1874 Frowde wrote requesting to see him.
[OUP Archives housed at OUP Headquarters, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, UK. File headed 'Henry Frowde, late publisher']The London Business
Frowde had no doubt that the Press's business in London could be very largely increased and was appointed on contract with a commission on sales. Seven years later, as Publisher to the University, Frowde was using his own name as an imprint as well as 'Oxford University Press'. This style persisted till recent times, with two kinds of imprints emenating from the Press's London offices. The last man to be known as ‘Publisher to the University' was John Brown, known to his colleagues as ‘Bruno'.
The distinctions implied by the imprints were subtle but important. Books which were issued by London on commission (paid for by their authors of by some learned body) were styled ‘Henry Frowde', or ‘Humphrey Milford' with no mention of OUP, as if the Publisher were issuing them himself, while books that the Publisher issued under the rubric of the University bore the imprint ‘Oxford University Press'. Both these categories were mostly handled by London, while Oxford (in practice the Secretary) looked after the Clarendon Press books. Commission books were intended to be cash cows to fund the London Business's overheads, since the Press did not lay aside any resources for this purpose. Nevertheless Frowde was especially careful to see that all commission books he published met with the Delegates' approval. This was not an uncommon arrangement for
scholarly or
antiquarian presses.
[H.S. Milford was to say that he could only explain the imprints with 'a good half hour's disquisition'. OUP Archives, Milford's Letterbooks Vol. 31 fol. 126, Milford to Sidney Lee, 17 June 1910.]Price quickly primed Frowde for the imminent publication jointly with Cambridge University Press of the
Revised Version of the Bible, which promised to be a ‘
bestseller' on a scale that would require the employment of all the Press's resources to keep up with the demand. This was to be a complete retranslation of the text of the Bible from the oldest original Greek and Hebrew versions, superseding the
Authorized Version of
1611. Frowde's agency was set up just in time, for the Revised Version, published on 17 May 1881, sold a million copies before publication and at a breakneck rate thenceforth, though overproduction ultimately made a dent in the profits.
[ OUP Archives, Delegates' File DUP/C/3/13]Though Frowde was by no means an Oxford man and had no social pretensions of being one, he was a sound businessman who was able to strike the magic balance between caution and enterprise. From quite early on he had ideas of advancing the Press's overseas trade, at first in Europe and increasingly in America, Canada, India and Africa. He was more or less singlehandedly responsible for setting up the American Branch as well as depots in
Edinburgh,
Toronto and
Melbourne. Frowde dealt with most of the logistics for books carrying the OUP imprint, including handling authors, binding, dispatching, and advertizing, and only editorial work and the printing itself were carried out at or supervised from Oxford.
[ See 'Henry Frowde's Letterbooks' in the OUP Archives for details of the day to day running of the London Business.]Frowde regularly remitted money back to Oxford, but he privately felt that the business was undercapitalized and would pretty soon become a serious drain on the university's resources unless put on a sound commercial footing. He himself was authorized to invest money up to a limit in the business but was prevented from doing so by family troubles. Hence his interest in overseas sales, for by the 1880s and 1890s there was money to be made in India, while the European book market was in the doldrums. But Frowde's distance from the Press's decision-making meant he was incapable of influencing policy unless a Delegate spoke for him. Most of the time Frowde did whatever he could within the mandate given him by the Delegates. In
1905 when applying for a pension he wrote to
J.R. Magrath, the then Vice Chancellor, that during the seven years when he had served as manager of the Bible Warehouse the sales of the London Business had averaged about £20,000 and the profits £1,887 per year. By 1905, under his management as Publisher, the sales had risen to upwards of £200,000 per year and the profits in that 29 years of service averaged £8,242 per year.
Conflict Over the Secretaryship
Price, trying in his own way to modernize the Press against the resistance of its own historical inertia, had become overworked and by
1883 was so exhausted as to want to retire. Benjamin Jowett had become Vice Chancellor of the University in
1882. Impatient of the endless committees that would no doubt attend the appointment of a successor to Price, Jowett extracted what could be interpreted as permission from the Delegates and headhunted
Philip Lyttelton Gell, a former student acolyte of his, to be the next Secretary to the Delegates. Gell was making a name for himself at the publishing firm of
Cassell, Petter and Galpin, a firm regarded as scandalously commercial by the Delegates. Gell himself was a patrician who was unhappy with his work, where he saw himself as catering to the taste of 'one class: the lower middle', and he grasped at the chance of working with the kind of texts and readerships OUP attracted.
Jowett promised Gell golden opportunities, little of which he actually had the authority to deliver. He timed Gell's appointment to coincide with both the Long Vacation (from June to September) and the death of Mark Pattison, so potential opposition was prevented from attending the crucial meetings. Jowett knew the primary reason why Gell would attract hostility was that he had never worked for the Press nor been a Delegate, and he had sullied himself in the City with raw commerce. His fears were borne out. Gell immediately proposed a thorough modernising of the Press with a marked lack of tact, and earned himself enduring enemies. Nevertheless he was able to do a lot in tandem with Frowde, and expanded the publishing programmes and the reach of OUP until about 1898. Then his health broke down under the impossible work conditions he was being forced to endure by the Delegates' non-cooperation. The Delegates then served him with a notice of termination of service that violated his contract. However, he was persuaded not to file suit and to go quietly.
[ See chapter two of Rimi B. Chatterjee, Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj (New Delhi: OUP, 2006) for the whole story of Gell's removal.]The Delegates were not opposed primarily to his initiatives, but to his manner of executing them and his lack of sympathy with the academic way of life. In their view the Press was, and always would be, an association of scholars. Gell's idea of ‘efficiency' appeared to violate that culture, although subsequently a very similar programme of reform was put into practice from the inside.
Charles Cannan, who had been instrumental in Gell's removal, succeeded Gell in
1900, and
Humphrey S. Milford, his younger colleague, effectively succeeded Frowde in 1907. Both were Oxford men who knew the system inside out, and the close collaboration with which they worked was a function of their shared background and worldview. Cannan was known for terrifying silences, and Milford had an uncanny ability, testified to by Amen House employees, to ‘disappear' in a room rather like a
Cheshire cat, from which obscurity he would suddenly address his subordinates and make them jump. Whatever their reasons for their style of working, both Cannan and Milford had a very hardnosed view of what needed to be done, and they proceeded to do it. Indeed Frowde knew within a few weeks of Milford's entering the London office in [1904] that he would be replaced. Milford, however, always treated Frowde with courtesy, and Frowde remained in an advisory capacity till
1913. Milford rapidly teamed up with
J.E. Hodder Williams of
Hodder and Stoughton, setting up what was known as the Joint Account for the issue of a wide range of books in education, science, medicine and also fiction. Milford began putting in practice a number of initiatives, including the foundations of most of the Press's global branches.
Development of Overseas Trade
Milford took responsibility for overseas trade almost at once, and by
1906 he was making plans to send a traveller to India and the Far East jointly with Hodder and Stoughton. N. Graydon (first name unknown) was the first such traveller in
1907, and again in
1908 when he represented OUP exclusively in India, the Straits and the Far East. A.H. Cobb replaced him in
1909, and in
1910 Cobb functioned as a travelling manager semi-permanently stationed in India. In
1911 E.V. Rieu went out to
East Asia via the
Trans-Siberian Railway, had several adventures in
China and
Russia, then came south to India and spent most of the year meeting educationists and officials all over India. In
1912, he arrived again in
Bombay, now known as Mumbai. There he rented an office in the dockside area and set up the first overseas Branch.
In
1914 Europe was plunged into turmoil. The first effects of the war were paper shortages and losses and disturbances in shipping, then quickly a dire lack of hands as the staff were called up and went to serve on the field. Many of the staff including two of the pioneers of the Indian branch were killed in action. Curiously, sales through the years 1914 to
1917 were good and it was only towards the end of the war that conditions really began pinching.
Rather than bringing relief from shortages the
1920s saw skyrocketing prices of both materials and labour. Paper especially was hard to come by and had to be imported from South America through trading companies. Economies and markets slowly recovered as the 1920s progressed. In 1928 the Press's imprint read ‘London, Edinburgh,
Glasgow,
Leipzig, Toronto, Melbourne,
Capetown, Bombay,
Calcutta,
Madras and Shanghai'. Not all of these were full-fledged branches: in Leipzig there was a depot run by H. Bohun Beet, and In Canada and Australia there were small, functional depots in the cities and an army of educational representatives penetrating the rural fastnesses to sell the Press's stock as well as books published by firms whose agencies were held by the Press, very often including fiction and light reading. In India, the Branch depots in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta were imposing establishments with sizable stock inventories, for the Presidencies themselves were large markets, and the educational representatives there dealt mostly with upcountry trade. The Depression of 1929 dried profits from the Americas to a trickle, and India became 'the one bright spot' in an otherwise dismal picture. Bombay was the nodal point for distribution to the africas and onward sale to Australasia, and people who trained at the three major depots moved later on to pioneer branches in Africa and South East Asia.
[ Milford's Letterbooks]The Press's experience of
World War II was similar to
World War I except that Milford was now close to retirement and ‘hated to see the young men go'. The London
blitz this time was much more intense and the London Business was shifted temporarily to Oxford. Milford, now extremely unwell and reeling under a series of personal bereavements, was prevailed upon to stay till the end of the war and keep the business going. As before, everything was in short supply, but the U-boat threat made shipping doubly uncertain, and the letterbooks are full of doleful records of consignments lost at sea. Occasionally an author, too, would be reported missing or dead, as well as staff who were now scattered over the battledfields of the globe. DORA, the
Defense of the Realm Act required the surrender of all nonessential metal for the manufacture of armaments, and many valuable
electrotype plates were melted down by government order.
With the end of the war Milford's place was taken by Geoffrey Cumberlege. This period saw consolidation in the face of the breakup of the Empire and the post-war reorganisation of the so-called Commonwealth. In tandem with institutions like the British Council, OUP began to reposition itself in the education market. Ngugi wa Thiongo in his book
Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom records how the Oxford Readers for Africa with their heavily Anglo-centric worldview struck him as a child in Kenya.
[Ngugi wa Thiongo, ‘Imperialism of Language', in Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom translated from the Gikuyu by Wangui wa Goro and Ngugi wa Thiong'o (London: Currey, 1993), p. 34. ] The Press has evolved since then to be one of the largest players in a globally expanding scholarly and reference book market.
The Indian Branch
The Indian Branch won a crucial contract to print textbooks for the
Central Provinces in 1915 and this helped to stabilise its fortunes in this difficult phase. Rieu could not longer delay his callup and was drafted in 1917, the management now being under his wife
Nellie Rieu, a former editor for the
Athenaeum ‘with the assistance of her two British babies.' It was too late to have important electrotype and stereotype plates shipped to India from Oxford, and the Oxford printing house itself was overburdened with government printing orders as the empire's propaganda machine got to work. At one point non-governmental composition at Oxford was reduced to 32 pages a week.
East Asia
In Shanghai a member of the
Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, Miss M. Verne McNeely, looked after the affairs of the Press and occasionally sent Milford boxes of complimentary cigars.
Dictionaries
The Oxford English DictionaryThe Concise Oxford English DictionaryThe Oxford Dictionary of National BiographyThe Advanced Learner's DictionaryIndology
The Religious Books of the SikhsSacred Books of the EastRulers of IndiaThe Early History of IndiaPrinter to the University
Horace Hart.It has lent its name to the
Oxford comma.
Please note: Much of this article is based on Chapters 1 and 2 of Rimi B. Chatterjee's
Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). The author has allowed this limited use of her work, but the book itself is of course protected by copyright.
Unpublished sourcesOUP archives held at OUP Headquartes, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford. File headed ‘Henry Frowde, late Publisher', H.S. Milford's Letterbooks, Henry Frowde's Letterbooks, Secretary's Letterbooks, File DUP/C/3/13
Noel L. Carrington, ‘Initiation into Publishing', in ‘Ebb Tide of the Raj', unpublished memoir in the holdings of the Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library.
Published sourcesHarry Carter,
A History of the Oxford University Press, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
Peter Sutcliffe,
The Oxford University Press: An Informal History, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
Peter Sutcliffe,
An Informal History of the OUP (Oxford: OUP, 1972).
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