The History of Oxford University Press. General Editor, Simon Eliot. Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1780, ed. Ian Gadd; Vol. 2: 1780–1896, ed. Simon Eliot; Vol. 3: 1896–1970, ed. Wm Roger Louis

Abstract

Here is a history of an organisation which is happy, quite rightly, to recognise itself as a National Institution; these volumes are clearly set forth as its official history. It is not the first account, having been preceded by I.G. Philip’s William Blackstone and the Reform of Oxford University Press in the Eighteenth Century (1957); Harry Carter’s A History of the Oxford University Press, Volume 1: To the Year 1780 (1975) and his other publications, including those on the Press’s financial records and the history of Wolvercote Mill; Peter Sutcliffe’s The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (1978); and Nicolas Barker’s The Oxford University Press and the Spread of Learning: An Illustrated History (1978), to name but several, all of them informative. The present three impressive volumes, by multiple authors (17 for vol. 1, 13 for vol. 2 and 23 for vol. 3), immediately raise the question of the relative advantages of multiple versus single authorship. The preferences of OUP, a battleship, and CUP, a frigate, have varied over the last 150 years or so. For example, Oxford’s History of English Literature (OHEL, as it was popularly termed) comprised a series of fourteen volumes by individual scholars appearing between 1945 and 1997, whereas CHEL, a less suggestive abbreviation, was a collaborative enterprise, edited by A.W. Ward and by A.R. Waller of Cambridge University Press, and had been published in fifteen volumes between 1906 and 1916. Conversely, the twentieth-century histories of the two universities (battleship and frigate again) appeared as eight collaborative volumes (Oxford) against four very disparate single-author volumes (Cambridge).