The Oxford University Press and the Spread of Learning 1478-1978 - An Illustrated History by Nicolas Barker

This volume celebrates the quincentenary of the introduction of printing at Oxford with a pictorial history of its subsequent progress, illustrated by the books, documents, and pictures which are its tangible record. The story, although it properly begins with the arrival of Theodoric Rood and the first learned and educational books that he printed, stretches back to the early thirteenth century when scribes, illuminators, and binders of books were already found in Oxford; but it was not until the seventeenth century that, at the initiative of two great men, Archbishop Laud and Bishop Fell, the University Press in its present form was established. It is the dark, dominant figure of John Fell, Dean of Christ Church and then Bishop of Oxford, who emerges as the real founder of the University Press, and the man who determined the type of books which still preoccupy the Press: learned and educational books, and the Bible.

After a decline in the eighteenth century, the Press was rescued by William Blackstone, the great academic lawyer, who reorganized it in time to meet the great new demand for the Bible which dominated the first half of the nineteenth century; but the Press as it is today is the creation of Bartholomew Price, the first permanent Secretary to the Delegates, who died in 1898. He saw the great potential demand for knowledge in Victorian England, and created and regulated the flow of books—learned works, educational books, and works of reference—with which the Oxford University Press met that demand. He saw the great New English Dictionary started and the first branch overseas, in New York, opened. His successors have built on this foundation to make the Press the foremost academic publishing and printing business in the world.