Oxford University Press

The University of Oxford began printing around 1480 and became a major printer of Bibles, prayer books, and scholarly works.^[7] 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".^[8] Laud also obtained the "privilege" from the Crown of printing the King James or Authorized Version of Scripture at Oxford.^[9] This privilege created substantial returns over the next 250 years.^[10]

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.^[11] In 1674, OUP began to print a broadsheet calendar, known as the Oxford Almanack, that was produced annually without interruption from 1674 to 2019.^[12][13] 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."^[14]

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.^[15] Nonetheless, Randolph^[ambiguous] 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.^[16]

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.^[17] 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.

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 ^[18] 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.^[19] 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.^[20] 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.^[21]

It took the 1850 Royal Commission on the workings of the university and a new Secretary, Bartholomew Price, to shake up the press.^[22] 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.^[23] 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.^[24]

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.^[25] 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."^[26] 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^[27] and playing a key role in setting up the press's first office outside Britain, in New York City in 1896.^[28]

Price transformed OUP. In 1884, the year he retired as Secretary, the Delegates bought back the last shares in the business.^[29] 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.^[30] 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).^[31]

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.^[32] 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.^[33] This vast financial burden and its implications landed on Price's successors.^{[citation needed]}

The next Secretary, Philip Lyttelton Gell, was appointed by the Vice-Chancellor Benjamin Jowett in 1884 but struggled and was finally dismissed in 1897.^[34] The Assistant Secretary, Charles Cannan, was instrumental in Gell's removal.^[35] 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."^[36]

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 sizable stock inventories, for the Presidencies themselves were large markets, and the educational representatives there dealt mostly with upcountry trade.^[37]

In 1923, OUP established a Music Department.^[38] At the time, such musical publishing enterprises, however, were rare.^[39] and few of the Delegates or former Publishers were themselves musical or had extensive music backgrounds.^{[citation needed]} OUP bought an Anglo-French Music Company and all its facilities, connections, and resources.^[38] This concentration provided OUP two mutually reinforcing benefits: a niche in music publishing unoccupied by potential competitors and a branch of music performance and composition that the English themselves had largely neglected. Hinnells proposes that the early Music Department's "mixture of scholarship and cultural nationalism" in an area of music with largely unknown commercial prospects was driven by its sense of cultural philanthropy (given the press's academic background) and a desire to promote "national music outside the German mainstream."^[40] It was not until 1939 that the Music Department showed its first profitable year.^[41]

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.^[42] In 1927–1934 Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, was reorganised by Geoffrey Cumberlege to return it to profitability from the lows of the Depression years. (In 1945–1956, Cumberlege would succeed Milford as publisher to the University of Oxford).^[43]

The period following World War II saw consolidation in the face of the breakup of the Empire and the post-war reorganization of the Commonwealth.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]} By the end of 2021, OUP USA had published eighteen Pulitzer Prize–winning books.^[44]

In July 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic its Bookshop on the High Street closed.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[45]

The Oxford University Press Museum is located on Great Clarendon Street, Oxford. Visits must be booked in advance and are led by an archive staff member. Displays include a 19th-century printing press, the OUP buildings, and the printing and history of the Oxford Almanack, Alice in Wonderland and the Oxford English Dictionary.^{[citation needed]}

OUP came to be known as "(The) Clarendon Press" when printing moved from the Sheldonian Theatre to the Clarendon Building in Broad Street in 1713. The name continued to be used when OUP moved to its present site in Oxford in 1830. The label "Clarendon Press" took on a new meaning when OUP began publishing books through its London office in the early 20th century. To distinguish the two offices, London books were labelled "Oxford University Press" publications, while those from Oxford were labelled "Clarendon Press" books. This labelling ceased in the 1970s when the London office of OUP closed. Today, OUP reserves "Clarendon Press" as an imprint for Oxford publications of particular academic importance.^[46]

OUP as Oxford Journals has also been a major publisher of academic journals, both in the sciences and the humanities; as of 2024^[update] it publishes more than 500 journals on behalf of learned societies around the world.^[47] It has been noted as one of the first university presses to publish an open access journal (Nucleic Acids Research), and probably the first to introduce so-called hybrid open access journals, offering "optional open access" to authors, which provides all readers with online access to their paper free of charge.^[48] The "Oxford Open" model applies to the majority of their journals.^[49] OUP is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.^[50]

OUP is a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact,^[51][52] and has taken steps to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the publishing industry.^{[53][54][55][56]} These include the publishing of a new series of Oxford Open Journals, including Oxford Open Climate Change, Oxford Open Energy, Oxford Open Immunology, Oxford Open Infrastructure and Health, and Oxford Open Digital Health.^[57][58][59]

Oxford University Press publishes a variety of dictionaries (e.g. Oxford English Dictionary, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Compact Editions of the Oxford English Dictionary, Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English, Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford Dictionary of Marketing, Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary), English as a second or foreign language resources (e.g. Let's Go), English language exams (e.g. Oxford Test of English and the Oxford Placement Test), bibliographies (e.g., Oxford Bibliographies Online^[60]), miscellaneous series such as Very Short Introductions, and books on Indology, music, classics, literature, history, Bibles, and atlases. Many of these are published under the Oxford Languages brand.

Since 2001, Oxford University Press has financially supported the Clarendon bursary, a University of Oxford graduate scholarship scheme.^[61]

In February 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa urging the execution of British author Salman Rushdie and of all involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie went into hiding, and an international movement began to boycott book trading with Iran. There was, therefore, outrage when, in April 1989, OUP broke the worldwide embargo and chose to attend the Tehran Book Fair. OUP justified this by saying, "We deliberated about it quite deeply but felt it certainly wasn't in our interests, or Iran's as a whole, to stay away."^[62] The New York Times^[63] and The Sunday Times^[64] both condemned Oxford's decision.

In 1990, in the UK Court of Appeal, author Andrew Malcolm won a landmark legal judgment against Oxford University (Press) for its breach of a contract to publish his philosophical text Making Names. Reporting on the verdict in The Observer, Laurence Marks wrote, "It is the first time in living memory that Grub Street has won such a victory over its oppressors".^[65] The Appeal Court judges were highly critical of Oxford's conduct of the affair and the litigation. Lord Justice Mustill declared, "The Press is one of the longest-established publishing houses in the United Kingdom, and no doubt in the world. They must have been aware from the outset that the absence of agreement on the matters in question [the book's print-run and format] was not, in the trade, regarded as preventing a formal agreement from coming into existence. Candour would, I believe, have required that this should have been made clear to the judge and ourselves, rather than a determined refusal to let the true position come to light... This is not quite all. I do not know whether an outsider studying the history of this transaction and of this litigation would feel that, in his self-financed struggle with the assembled Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford the appellant has had a fair crack of the whip. I certainly do not... Mr Charkin took the decision [to renege on the OUP editor's contract], not because he thought the book was no good - he had never seen it and the reports were favourable - but because he thought it would not sell. Let there be no mistake about it, the failure of this transaction was about money, not prestige. Nor does the course of the litigation give any reason to suppose that the Press had any interest but to resist the claim, no matter on what grounds, so long as they succeeded."^[66] Lord Justice Leggatt added: "It is difficult to know what the Deputy Judge (Lightman) meant by a 'firm commitment' other than an intention to create legal relations. Nothing short of that would have had any value whatever for Mr Malcolm... To suggest that Mr Hardy intended to induce Mr Malcolm to revise the book by giving him a valueless assurance would be tantamount to an imputation of fraud... It follows that in my judgment when Mr Hardy used the expressions 'commitment' and 'a fair royalty' he did in fact mean what he said; and I venture to think that it would take a lawyer to arrive at any other conclusion. There was therefore an enforceable contract for the publication of Mr Malcolm's book... The Respondents' final statement may be thought unworthy of them."^[66]

The case ended in July 1992 with a Tomlin order, a damages settlement under which the servants and agents of Oxford University are permanently barred from denigrating Malcolm or Making Names, rendering it the first book in literary history to be afforded such legal protection.^[67][68][69] The case was reported to have cost Oxford over £500,000.^[70]

In November 1998, OUP announced the closure, on commercial grounds, of its modern poetry list. Andrew Potter, OUP's director of music, trade paperbacks and Bibles, told The Times that the list "just about breaks even. The university expects us to operate on commercial grounds, especially in this day and age."^[71] In the same article, the poet D. J. Enright, who had been with OUP since 1979, said, "There was no warning. It was presented as a fait accompli. Even the poetry editor didn't know....The money involved is peanuts. It's a good list, built up over many years."^[71] In February 1999, Arts Minister Alan Howarth made a speech in Oxford in which he denounced the closure: "OUP is not merely a business. It is a department of the University of Oxford and has charitable status. It is part of a great university, which the Government supports financially and which exists to develop and transmit our intellectual culture....It is a perennial complaint by the English faculty that the barbarians are at the gate. Indeed they always are. But we don't expect the gatekeepers themselves, the custodians, to be barbarians."^[72] Oxford's professor Valentine Cunningham wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement: "Increasingly, (OUP) has behaved largely like a commercial outfit, with pound signs in its eyes and a readiness to dumb down for the sake of popularity and sales....Sacking poets not because they lose money but because they do not make enough of it: it is an allegory of a university press missing the point, mistaking its prime purpose."^[73] In March 1999 The Times Literary Supplement commissioned Andrew Malcolm to write an article under the strapline "Why the present constitution of the OUP cannot work".^[74] A decade later, OUP's managing director, Ivon Asquith, reflected on the public relations damage caused by the episode: "If I had foreseen the self-inflicted wound we would suffer I would not have let the proposal get as far as the Finance Committee."^[75]

Since the 1940s, both OUP and the Cambridge University Press (CUP), had made applications to the Inland Revenue for exemption from corporate tax. The first application, by CUP in 1940, was rejected "on the ground that, since the Press was printing and publishing for the outside world and not simply for the internal use of the University, the Press's trade went beyond the purpose and objects of the University and (in terms of the Act) was not exercised in the course of the actual carrying out of a primary purpose of the University."^[76] Similar applications by OUP in 1944 and 1950 were also rejected by the Inland Revenue, whose officers repeatedly pointed out that the university presses were in open competition with commercial, tax-liable publishers. In November 1975, CUP's chief executive Geoffrey Cass again applied to the Inland Revenue, and a year later, CUP's tax exemption was quietly conceded.^[77][78] OUP's Chief Executive George Richardson followed suit in 1977. OUP's tax exemption was granted in 1978. The decisions were not made public. The issue was only brought to public attention due to press interest in OUP following the poetry list closure controversy.^[73] In 1999, the campaigner Andrew Malcolm published his second book, The Remedy, where he alleged that OUP breached its 1978 tax-exemption conditions. This was reported in a front-page article in The Oxford Times, along with OUP's response.^[79]

In March 2001, after a 28-year battle with the Indian tax authorities, OUP lost its tax exemption in India. The Supreme Court ruled that OUP was not tax exempt in the subcontinent "because it does not carry out any university activities there but acts simply as a commercial publisher".^[80] To pay off back taxes, owed since the 1970s, OUP was obliged to sell its Mumbai headquarters building, Oxford House. The Bookseller reported that "The case has again raised questions about OUP's status in the UK".^[81] In 2003, Joel Rickett of The Bookseller wrote an article in The Guardian describing the resentment of commercial rivals at OUP's tax exemption. Rickett accurately predicted that the funds which would have been paid in tax were "likely to be used to confirm OUP's dominance by buying up other publishers."^[82] Between 1989 and 2018, OUP bought out over 70 rival book and journal publishers. In 2007, with the new "public benefit" requirement of the revised Charities Act, the issue was re-examined ^[83] with particular reference to OUP.^[84]In the same year, Malcolm obtained and posted the documents of OUP’s applications to the Inland Revenue for tax exemption in the 1940s and 1950s (unsuccessful)^[85] and the 1970s (successful).^[86] In 2008, CUP's and OUP's privilege was attacked by rival publishers.^[87][88] In 2009, The Guardian invited Andrew Malcolm to write an article on the subject.^[89]

In July 2012, the UK's Serious Fraud Office found OUP's branches in Kenya and Tanzania guilty of bribery to obtain school bookselling contracts sponsored by the World Bank. Oxford was fined £1.9 million "in recognition of sums it received which were generated through unlawful conduct" and barred from applying for World Bank-financed projects for three years.^[90][91]

In December 2023, concerns were raised that OUP had published an academic paper based on genetic data taken from the Uyghur population of Xinjiang, a Turkic ethnic group in China.^[92] Rhys Blakely, a science correspondent for The Times, reported: "The research has been published online by Oxford University Press (OUP) in a journal that receives financial support from China's Ministry of Justice. The highly unusual deal will raise fears that Oxford risks becoming entangled in human rights abuses against the Uighur community. It will also add to concerns over China's efforts to influence UK academia."^[93] In February, OUP announced that it was carrying out internal investigations into two further studies, based on DNA taken from China's Xibe ethnic minority.^[94] On 17 May, The Times reported that Oxford had retracted the two studies, quoting a statement from the OUP: "Earlier this year, we were alerted to concerns regarding two papers in Forensics Sciences Research. Based on the information we received, we undertook further investigation and took the decision to retract the papers, in line with industry standard processes."^[95]

• Gadd, Ian, ed. (2014). The History of Oxford University Press: Volume I: Beginnings to 1780. Oxford: OUP. ISBN 9780199557318.
• Eliot, Simon, ed. (2014). The History of Oxford University Press: Volume II: 1780 to 1896. Oxford: OUP. ISBN 9780199543151.
• Louis, Wm. Roger, ed. (2014). The History of Oxford University Press: Volume III: 1896 to 1970. Oxford: OUP. ISBN 9780199568406. Also online doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199568406.001.0001.
• "A View of the Oxford University Press." The Book Collector 20 (no.4) Winter 1971: 447-464.
• Robbins, Keith, ed. (2017). The History of Oxford University Press: Volume IV: 1970 to 2004. Oxford: OUP. ISBN 9780199574797.

• Official website  
• Oxford University Press at the Wayback Machine (archive index)
• Illustrated article: The Most Famous Press in the World, World's Work and Play, June 1903