The story of Oxford University Press spans five centuries of printing and publishing. Beginning with the first presses set up in Oxford in the fifteenth century and the later establishment of a university printing house, it leads through the publication of bibles, scholarly works, and the Oxford English Dictionary, to a twentieth-century expansion that created the largest university press in the world, playing a part in research, education, and language learning in more than 50 countries. With access to extensive archives, The History of OUP traces the impact of long-term changes in printing technology and the business of publishing. It also considers the effects of wider trends in education, reading, and scholarship, in international trade and the spreading influence of the English language, and in cultural and social history-both in Oxford and through its presence around the world.
By the late eighteenth century, the University Press was both printer and publisher. This volume charts its rich and complicated history between 1780 and 1896, when transformations in the way books were printed led, in turn, to greater expertise in distributing and selling Oxford books. Simon Eliot and twelve expert contributors look at the relationship of the Press with the wider book trade, and with the University and city of Oxford. They also explore the growing range of books produced - including, above all, the creation and initial publication of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Simon Eliot is Professor of the History of the Book in the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He directs the MA in the History of the Book, and the London Rare Books School. He is a visiting professor of book history at the Open University, where he set up the Reading Experience Database (RED), and at the University of Reading. He has published on quantitative book history, publishing history, the history of reading, the history of lighting, and library history. He has co-edited The Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book and Literary Cultures and the Material Book. He is General Editor of the new multi-volume History of Oxford University Press.
