, part of his collection now known as the "Fell Types", shown in the OUP Museum
Early origins (1480–1668) The University of Oxford began printing around 1480 and became a major printer of Bibles, prayer books, and scholarly works. Oxford's chancellor Archbishop
William Laud consolidated the legal status of the university's printing in the 1630s and petitioned
Charles I for rights that would enable Oxford to compete with the Stationers' Company and the
King's Printer. He obtained a succession of royal grants, and Oxford's "Great Charter" in 1636 gave the university the right to print "all manner of books". Laud also obtained the "privilege" from the Crown of printing the
King James or
Authorized Version of
Scripture at Oxford. This privilege created substantial returns over the next 250 years.
Print shop establishment and expansion (1668–1830) Following the
English Civil War, Vice-chancellor
John Fell,
Dean of
Christ Church,
Bishop of Oxford, and Secretary to the Delegates was determined to install printing presses in 1668, making it the university's first central print shop. In 1674, OUP began to print a
broadsheet calendar, known as the
Oxford Almanack, that was produced annually without interruption from 1674 to 2019. Fell drew up the first formal programme for the university's printing, which envisaged hundreds of works, including the Bible in
Greek, editions of the Coptic Gospels and works of the
Church Fathers, texts in
Arabic and
Syriac, comprehensive editions of
classical philosophy, poetry, and mathematics, a wide range of
medieval scholarship, and also "a history of insects, more perfect than any yet Extant." Generally speaking, the early 18th century marked a lull in the press's expansion. It suffered from the absence of any figure comparable to Fell. The business was rescued by the intervention of a single Delegate,
William Blackstone. Disgusted by the chaotic state of the press and antagonized by Vice-Chancellor
George Huddesford, Blackstone called for sweeping reforms that would firmly set out the Delegates' powers and obligations, officially record their deliberations and accounting, and put the print shop on an efficient footing. Nonetheless, Randolph ignored this document, and it was not until Blackstone threatened legal action that changes began. The university had moved to adopt all of Blackstone's reforms by 1760. By the late 18th century, the press had become more focused. In 1825, the Delegates bought land on Walton Street. Buildings were constructed from plans drawn up by
Daniel Robertson and
Edward Blore, and the press moved into them in 1830. This site remains the principal office of OUP in the 21st century, at the corner of
Walton Street and
Great Clarendon Street, northwest of Oxford city centre.
Commercial growth and scholarly publishing (1830–1870) The press then entered an era of enormous change. In 1830, it was still a
joint-stock printing business in an academic backwater, offering learned works to a relatively small readership of scholars and clerics At this time,
Thomas Combe joined the press and became the university's
Printer until he died in 1872. Combe was a better businessman than most Delegates but still no innovator: he failed to grasp the huge commercial potential of
India paper, which grew into one of Oxford's most profitable trade secrets in later years. Even so, Combe earned a fortune through his shares in the business and the acquisition and renovation of the bankrupt paper mill at Wolvercote. Combe showed little interest, however, in producing fine printed work at the press. The best-known text associated with his print shop was the flawed first edition of ''
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'', printed by Oxford at the expense of its author
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) in 1865. It took the 1850
Royal Commission on the workings of the university and a new Secretary,
Bartholomew Price, to shake up the press. Appointed in 1868, Price had already recommended to the university that the press needed an efficient executive officer to exercise "vigilant superintendence" of the business, including its dealings with
Alexander Macmillan, who became the publisher for Oxford's printing in 1863 and 1866 helped Price to create the Clarendon Press series of cheap, elementary school books – perhaps the first time that Oxford used the Clarendon imprint. Under Price, the press began to take on its modern shape. Major new lines of work began. For example, in 1875, the Delegates approved the series
Sacred Books of the East under the editorship of
Friedrich Max Müller, bringing a vast range of religious thought to a wider readership. Equally, Price moved OUP towards publishing in its own right. The press had ended its relationship with Parker's in 1863 and, in 1870, bought a small London bindery for some Bible work. Macmillan's contract ended in 1880 and was not renewed. By this time, Oxford also had a London warehouse for Bible stock in
Paternoster Row, and in 1880, its manager, Henry Frowde (1841–1927), was given the formal title of Publisher to the university. Frowde came from the book trade, not the university, and remained an enigma to many. One obituary in Oxford's staff magazine
The Clarendonian admitted, "Very few of us here in Oxford had any personal knowledge of him." Despite that, Frowde became vital to OUP's growth, adding new lines of books to the business, presiding over the massive publication of the
Revised Version of the
New Testament in 1881 and playing a key role in setting up the press's first office outside Britain, in New York City in 1896. Price transformed OUP. In 1884, the year he retired as Secretary, the Delegates bought back the last shares in the business. The press was now owned wholly by the university, with its own paper mill, print shop, bindery, and warehouse. Its output had increased to include school books and modern scholarly texts such as
James Clerk Maxwell's
A Treatise on Electricity & Magnetism (1873), which proved fundamental to
Einstein's thought. Without abandoning its traditions or quality of work, Price began to turn OUP into an alert, modern publisher. In 1879, he also took on the publication that led that process to its conclusion: the massive project that became the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Offered to Oxford by
James Murray and the
Philological Society, the "New English Dictionary" was a grand academic and patriotic undertaking. Lengthy negotiations led to a formal contract. Murray was to edit a work estimated to take ten years and to cost approximately £9,000. Both figures were wildly optimistic. The Dictionary began appearing in print in 1884, but the first edition was not completed until 1928, 13 years after Murray's death, costing around £375,000. This vast financial burden and its implications landed on Price's successors. The next Secretary,
Philip Lyttelton Gell, was appointed by the Vice-Chancellor
Benjamin Jowett in 1884 but struggled and was finally dismissed in 1897. The Assistant Secretary, Charles Cannan, was instrumental in Gell's removal. Cannan took over with little fuss and even less affection for his predecessor in 1898: "Gell was always here, but I cannot make out what he did." By the early 20th century, OUP expanded its overseas trade, partly due to the efforts of
Humphrey Milford, the publisher of the University of Oxford from 1913 to 1945. The 1920s saw skyrocketing prices of both materials and labour. Paper 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,
Cape Town, 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 sizeable stock inventories, for the Presidencies themselves were large markets, and the educational representatives there dealt mostly with upcountry trade. In 1923, OUP established a Music Department. At the time, such musical publishing enterprises, however, were rare. and few of the Delegates or former Publishers were themselves musical or had extensive music backgrounds. OUP bought an Anglo-French Music Company and all its facilities, connections, and resources. It was not until 1939 that the Music Department showed its first profitable year. 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 later moved to pioneer branches in Africa and Southeast Asia. The period following
World War II saw consolidation in the face of the break-up of the Empire and the post-war reorganization of the Commonwealth. In the 1960s, OUP Southern Africa started publishing local authors for the general reader, but also for schools and universities, under its
Three Crowns Books imprint. Its territory includes
Botswana,
Lesotho,
Swaziland, and
Namibia, as well as South Africa, the biggest market of the five. OUP Southern Africa is now one of the three biggest educational publishers in South Africa. It focuses on publishing textbooks, dictionaries, atlases, supplementary material for schools, and university textbooks. Its author base is overwhelmingly local, and in 2008, it partnered with the university to support
scholarships for South Africans studying postgraduate degrees. Operations in South Asia and East and South East Asia were and, in the case of the former, remain significant parts of the company. Today, the North American branch in New York City is primarily a distribution branch to facilitate the sale of
Oxford Bibles in the United States. It also handles marketing of all books of its parent, Macmillan. By the end of 2021, OUP USA had published eighteen Pulitzer Prize–winning books. In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic its Bookshop on the High Street closed. On 27 August 2021, OUP closed Oxuniprint, its printing division. The closure will mark the "final chapter" of OUP's centuries-long history of printing. == Museum ==