The Grandfather

When peppery Sir William Blackstone, author of the Commentaries, first got his appointment to the board of delegates of the Oxford University Press in 1755, he took one look at the record and flew into a rage. The learned press, said he, is "languishing in a lazy obscurity, and barely reminding us of its existence, by now and then slowly bringing forth a Program, a Sermon printed by request, or at best a Bodleian Catalogue." Sir William's blast had its effect. The world has rarely since had to be reminded of the existence of the Press, which today is the world's most prodigious book publisher.

Last week, as it celebrated its 475th anniversary with a modest dinner in Manhattan (and no ceremony at all in London), the Press could boast branch offices in Melbourne, Toronto. Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Wellington, Karachi, Glasgow, Cape Town and Ibadan, as well as a whole separate corporation in the United States. It is the only book publisher with its own paper mill; it has the world's largest permanent catalogue (10,000 titles), (the largest stock 15 million volumes) and probably the biggest sales (nearly 10 million books a year from the British list alone). The grandfather of all university presses, it has been don, professor, schoolmaster, campus and classroom to millions of scholars and laymen.

Several into One. The Press published its first book, a Commentary on the Apostles' Creed, attributed to St. Jerome, just a year after Caxton printed his first book in 1477. By the time William (later Archbishop) Laud took over the chancellorship of Oxford in 1629, it was printing such titles as Captain John Smith's Map of Virginia, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Bacon's Advancement of Learning.

Later, under Dr. John Fell,* it started its paper mill, began buying type from Holland, was "furnisht with Arabick, Hebrew, Greek, Latin & English matrices, as also letters in the Aforesaid languages." Finally, after the slump that brought on Blackstone's blast, the Press slowly began to achieve its present size and shape.

It is really several presses in one. Under the Board of Delegates, all Oxford dons, the Clarendon Press skims off the cream of the scholarly crop. The U.S. press is almost entirely autonomous, and the other branches may also publish on their own. But taken all together, the Oxford University Press covers just about everything except new novels. It has published Lord Bryce's Studies of History and Jurisprudence, Stubbs's Constitutional History of England, Sanskrit and Gothic grammars and the first English translation of Pavlov's Conditioned Reflexes. Its famed dictionary (414,825 words) is the scholar's final arbiter on English words, and its books of verse, its series of Companions and its reprints of the classics are in hundreds of thousands of libraries.

Better Be Good. It turns out music, medical books, Bibles, hymnals, Britain's Dictionary of National Biography, Fowler's Modern English Usage, children's stories, books on Geodesy and Eigen junction Expansions, and such bestsellers as Toynbee's Study of History and Jim Corbett's Man-Eaters of Kumaon.

The Press, however, is more than a big business, and is not afraid to turn out books that lose money. But, says Secretary A.L.P. Norrington, "if you're going to drop -L-500, it had better be a good book."

*Famed today mostly for Undergraduate Thomas Brown's off-the-cuff insult: I do not love thee, Doctor Fell The reason why I cannot tell; But this alone 1 know full well, I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.

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