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| Oxford University Press |
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative on other university bodies. Oxford University has used a similar system to oversee the Press since the 17th century.
The university became involved in the print trade around 1480, and grew into a major printer of Bibles, prayer books, and scholarly works. Its Press took on the project which became the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th century, and expanded to meet the ever-rising costs of the work.[4] As a result, the last hundred years has seen Oxford publish children's books, school text books, music, journals, the World's Classics series, and a best-selling range of English Language Teaching texts to match its academic and religious titles. Moves into international markets led to the Press opening its own offices outside the United Kingdom, beginning with New York in 1896. With the advent of computer technology and increasingly harsh trading conditions, the Press's printing house at Oxford was closed in 1989, and its former paper mill at Wolvercote was demolished in 2004. By contracting out its printing and binding operations, the modern Press publishes some 6,000 new titles around the world each year. As part of a charitable organization, OUP is committed to major financial support of its parent university, and furthers the university's aims of excellence in scholarship, research, and education through its publishing activities.
OUP was first exempted from US Corporation Tax in 1972 and from UK Corporation Tax in 1978. As a department of a charity, OUP is exempt from income tax and corporate tax in most countries, but may pay sales and other commercial taxes on its products. The Press today transfers 30% of its annual surplus to the rest of the University, with a commitment to a minimum transfer of £12 million per annum. OUP is the largest university press in the world by the number of publications, publishing more than 4,500 new books every year and employing some 4,000 people. OUP publishes many reference, professional, and academic works including the Oxford English Dictionary, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the Oxford World's Classics, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the Concise Dictionary of National Biography. A number of its most important titles are now available electronically in a package called "Oxford Reference Online", and are offered free to holders of a reader's card from many public libraries in the UK.
Books published by Oxford have International Standard Book Numbers that begin with 0-19, making the Press one of a tiny number of publishers who have two-digit identification numbers in the ISBN system. By internal agreement, the first digit of the individual edition number (following 0-19-) can indicate a particular originating division, for example: 3 for music (before ISMNs were defined); 5 for the New York office; 8 for Clarendon Press publications.
Early history
The first printer to be associated with Oxford University was Theoderic Rood. A business associate of William Caxton, Rood seems to have brought his own wooden printing press to Oxford from Cologne as a speculative venture, and to have worked in the city between around 1480 and 1483. The first book printed in Oxford, in 1478, an edition of Rufinus's Expositio in symbolum apostolorum, was printed by another, anonymous, printer. Famously, this was mis-dated in Roman numerals as "1468", thus apparently pre-dating Caxton. Rood's printing included John Ankywyll's Compendium totius grammaticae which set new standards for the teaching of Latin grammar.
After Rood, printing connected with the University remained sporadic for over half a century. Records or surviving work are few, and Oxford did not put its printing on a firm footing until the 1580s: this followed the efforts of Cambridge University, which had obtained a license for its press in 1534. In response to constraints on printing outside London imposed by the Crown and the Stationers' Company, Oxford petitioned Elizabeth I for the formal right to operate a press at the university. The Chancellor Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester pleaded Oxford's case. Some royal assent was obtained, since the printer Joseph Barnes began work, and a decree of Star Chamber noted the legal existence of a press at "the universitie of Oxforde" in 1586.
The London business
Frowde had no doubt that the Press's business in London could be very largely increased and was appointed on contract with a commission on sales. Seven years later, as Publisher to the University, Frowde was using his own name as an imprint as well as 'Oxford University Press'. This style persisted till recent times, with two kinds of imprints emanating from the Press's London offices. The last man to be known as 'Publisher to the University' was John Gilbert Newton Brown, known to his colleagues as 'Bruno'. The distinctions implied by the imprints were subtle but important. Books which were issued by London on commission (paid for by their authors or by some learned body) were styled 'Henry Frowde', or 'Humphrey Milford' with no mention of OUP, as if the Publisher were issuing them himself, while books that the Publisher issued under the rubric of the University bore the imprint 'Oxford University Press'. Both these categories were mostly handled by London, while Oxford (in practice the Secretary) looked after the Clarendon Press books. Commission books were intended to be cash cows to fund the London Business's overheads, since the Press did not lay aside any resources for this purpose. Nevertheless Frowde was especially careful to see that all commission books he published met with the Delegates' approval. This was not an uncommon arrangement for scholarly or antiquarian presses.
Price quickly primed Frowde for the imminent publication jointly with Cambridge University Press of the Revised Version of the Bible, which promised to be a 'bestseller' on a scale that would require the employment of all the Press's resources to keep up with the demand. This was to be a complete retranslation of the text of the Bible from the oldest original Greek and Hebrew versions, superseding the Authorized Version of 1611. Frowde's agency was set up just in time, for the Revised Version, published on 17 May 1881, sold a million copies before publication and at a breakneck rate thenceforth, though overproduction ultimately made a dent in the profits.[citation needed] Though Frowde was by no means an Oxford man and had no social pretensions of being one, he was a sound businessman who was able to strike the magic balance between caution and enterprise. From quite early on he had ideas of advancing the Press's overseas trade, at first in Europe and increasingly in America, Canada, India and Africa. He was more or less singlehandedly responsible for setting up the American Branch as well as depots in Edinburgh, Toronto and Melbourne. Frowde dealt with most of the logistics for books carrying the OUP imprint, including handling authors, binding, dispatching, and advertising, and only editorial work and the printing itself were carried out at or supervised from Oxford.
Frowde regularly remitted money back to Oxford, but he privately felt that the business was undercapitalized and would pretty soon become a serious drain on the university's resources unless put on a sound commercial footing. He himself was authorized to invest money up to a limit in the business but was prevented from doing so by family troubles. Hence his interest in overseas sales, for by the 1880s and 1890s there was money to be made in India, while the European book market was in the doldrums. But Frowde's distance from the Press's decision-making meant he was incapable of influencing policy unless a Delegate spoke for him. Most of the time Frowde did whatever he could within the mandate given him by the Delegates. In 1905 when applying for a pension he wrote to J.R. Magrath, the then Vice Chancellor, that during the seven years when he had served as manager of the Bible Warehouse the sales of the London Business had averaged about £20,000 and the profits £1,887 per year. By 1905, under his management as Publisher, the sales had risen to upwards of £200,000 per year and the profits in that 29 years of service averaged £8,242 per year.
Development of overseas trade
Milford took responsibility for overseas trade almost at once, and by 1906 he was making plans to send a traveller to India and the Far East jointly with Hodder and Stoughton. N. Graydon (first name unknown) was the first such traveller in 1907, and again in 1908 when he represented OUP exclusively in India, the Straits and the Far East. A.H. Cobb replaced him in 1909, and in 1910 Cobb functioned as a travelling manager semi-permanently stationed in India. In 1911 E.V. Rieu went out to East Asia via the Trans-Siberian Railway, had several adventures in China and Russia, then came south to India and spent most of the year meeting educationists and officials all over India. In 1912, he arrived again in Bombay, now known as Mumbai. There he rented an office in the dockside area and set up the first overseas Branch.
In 1914 Europe was plunged into turmoil. The first effects of the war were paper shortages and losses and disturbances in shipping, then quickly a dire lack of hands as the staff were called up and went to serve on the field. Many of the staff including two of the pioneers of the Indian branch were killed in action. Curiously, sales through the years 1914 to 1917 were good and it was only towards the end of the war that conditions really began pinching.
Rather than bringing relief from shortages the 1920s saw skyrocketing prices of both materials and labour. Paper especially 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. 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 moved later on to pioneer branches in Africa and South East Asia.
The Press’s experience of World War II was similar to World War I except that Milford was now close to retirement and ‘hated to see the young men go’. The London blitz this time was much more intense and the London Business was shifted temporarily to Oxford. Milford, now extremely unwell and reeling under a series of personal bereavements, was prevailed upon to stay till the end of the war and keep the business going. As before, everything was in short supply, but the U-boat threat made shipping doubly uncertain, and the letterbooks are full of doleful records of consignments lost at sea. Occasionally an author, too, would be reported missing or dead, as well as staff who were now scattered over the battlefields of the globe. DORA, the Defence of the Realm Act, required the surrender of all nonessential metal for the manufacture of armaments, and many valuable electrotype plates were melted down by government order.
With the end of the war Milford's place was taken by Geoffrey Cumberlege. This period saw consolidation in the face of the breakup of the Empire and the post-war reorganization of the Commonwealth. In tandem with institutions like the British Council, OUP began to reposition itself in the education market. Ngugi wa Thiongo in his book Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom records how the Oxford Readers for Africa with their heavily Anglo-centric worldview struck him as a child in Kenya. The Press has evolved since then to be one of the largest players in a globally expanding scholarly and reference book market.
Establishment of the Music Department
Prior to the twentieth century, the Press at Oxford had occasionally printed a piece of music or a book relating to musicology. It had also published The Yattendon Hymnal in 1899 and, more significantly, the first edition of The English Hymnal in 1906, under the editorship of Percy Dearmer and the then largely unknown Ralph Vaughan Williams. Sir William Henry Hadow's multi-volume Oxford History of Music had appeared between 1901 and 1905. Such musical publishing enterprises, however, were rare: "In nineteenth-century Oxford the idea that music might in any sense be educational would not have been entertained", and few of the Delegates or former Publishers were themselves musical or had extensive music backgrounds.
In the London office, however, Milford had musical taste, and had connections particularly with the world of church and cathedral musicians. In 1921, Milford hired Hubert J. Foss, originally as an assistant to Educational Manger V. H. Collins. In that work, Foss showed energy and imagination. However, as Sutcliffe says, Foss, a modest composer and gifted pianist, "was not particularly interested in education; he was passionately interested in music." When shortly thereafter Foss brought to Milford a scheme for publishing a group of essays by well-known musicians on composers whose works were frequently played on the radio, Milford may have thought of it as less music-related than education-related. There is no clear record of the thought process whereby the Press would enter into the publishing of music for performance. Foss's presence, and his knowledge, ability, enthusiasm, and imagination may well have been the catalyst bringing hitherto unconnected activities together in Milford's mind, as another new venture similar to the establishment of the overseas branches.
Milford may not have fully understood what he was undertaking. A fiftieth anniversary pamphlet published by the Music Department in 1973 says that OUP had "no knowledge of the music trade, no representative to sell to music shops, and−−it seems−−no awareness that sheet music was in any way a different commodity from books." However intentionally or intuitively, Milford took three steps that launched OUP on a major operation. He bought the Anglo-French Music Company and all its facilities, connections, and resources. He hired Norman Peterkin, a moderately well-known musician, as full-time sales manager for music. And in 1923 he established as a separate division the Music Department, with its own offices in Amen House and with Foss as first Musical Editor. Then, other than general support, Milford left Foss largely to his own devices.
Foss responded with incredible energy. He worked to establish "the largest possible list in the shortest possible time," adding titles at the rate of over 200 a year; eight years later there were 1750 titles in the catalogue. In the year of the department's establishment, Foss began a series of inexpensive but well edited and printed choral pieces under the series title "Oxford Choral Songs". This series, under the general editorship of W. G. Whittaker, was OUP's first commitment to the publishing of music for performance, rather than in book form or for study. The series plan was expanded by adding the similarly inexpensive but high quality "Oxford Church Music" and "Tudor Church Music" (taken over from the Carnagie UK Trust); all these series continue today. The scheme of contributed essays which Foss had originally brought to Milford appeared in 1927 as the Heritage of Music (two more volumes would appear over the next thirty years). Percy Scholes's Listener's Guide to Music (originally published in 1919) was similarly brought into the new department as the first of a series of books on music appreciation for the listening public. Scholes's continuing work for OUP, designed to match the growth of broadcast and recorded music, plus his other work in journalistic music criticism, would be later comprehensively organized and summarized in the Oxford Companion to Music.
Perhaps most importantly, Foss seemed to have a knack for finding new composers of what he regarded as distinctively English music which had broad appeal to the public. 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 which had been largely neglected by the English themselves. 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."
In consequence, Foss actively promoted the performance and sought publication of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Constant Lambert, Alan Rawsthorne, Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine), Edmund Rubbra and other English composers. In what the Press called "the most durable gentleman's agreement in the history of modern music," Foss guaranteed the publication of any music that Vaughan Williams would care to offer them. In addition, Foss worked to secure OUP's rights not only to music publication and live performance, but the "mechanical" rights to recording and broadcast. It was not at all clear at the time how significant these would become. Indeed, Foss, OUP, and a number of composers at first declined to join or support the Performing Right Society, fearing that its fees would discourage performance in the new media. Later years would show that, to the contrary, these forms of music would prove more lucrative than the traditional venues of music publishing.
Whatever the Music Department's growth in quantity, breadth of musical offering, and reputation amongst both musicians and the general public, the whole question of financial return came to a head in the 1930s. Milford as London publisher had fully supported the Music Department during its years of formation and growth. However, he came under increasing pressure from the Delegates in Oxford concerning the continued flow of expenditures from what seemed to them an unprofitable venture. In their mind, the operations at Amen House were supposed to be both academically respectable and financially remunerative. The London office "existed to make money for the Clarendon Press to spend on the promotion of learning." Further, OUP treated its book publications as short-term projects: any books that did not sell within a few years of publication were written off (to show as unplanned or hidden income if in fact they sold thereafter). In contrast, the Music Department's emphasis on music for performance was comparatively long-term and continuing, particularly as income from recurring broadcasts or recordings came in, and as it continued to build its relationships with new and upcoming musicians. The Delegates were not comfortable with Foss's viewpoint: "I still think this word 'loss' is a misnomer: is it not really capital invested?" wrote Foss to Milford in 1934.
Thus it was not until 1939 that the Music Department showed its first profitable year. By then, the economic pressures of the Depression as well as the in-house pressure to reduce expenditures, and possibly the academic background of the parent body in Oxford, combined to make OUP's primary musical business that of publishing works intended for formal musical education and for music appreciation−−again the influence of broadcast and recording. This matched well with an increased demand for materials to support music education in British schools, a result of governmental reforms of education during the 1930s. The Press did not cease to search out and publish new musicians and their music, but the tenor of the business had changed. Foss, suffering personal health problems, chafing under economic constraints plus (as the war years drew on) shortages in paper, and disliking intensely the move of all the London operations to Oxford to avoid The Blitz, resigned his position in 1941, to be succeeded by Peterkin.
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