In the eighteenth century the Bible Press grew in strength with the co-operation of London booksellers and finally with the establishment (in 1770, if not earlier) of its own Bible Warehouse in Paternoster Row. The Learned Press, on the other hand, though some important books were produced, suffered from the general apathy which then pervaded the University. Sir William Blackstone, having been appointed a Delegate, found that his colleagues did not meet, or met only to do nothing; and addressed to the Vice-Chancellor a vigorous pamphlet, in which he described the Press as ‘languishing in a lazy obscurity, and barely reminding us of its existence, by now and then slowly bringing forth a Program, a Sermon printed by request, or at best a Bodleian Catalogue’. The great lawyer’s polemic gradually battered down the ramparts of ignorant negligence, and the Press began to revive under the new statute which he promoted. Dr. Johnson in 1767 was able to assure his sovereign that the authorities at Oxford ‘had put their press under better regulation, and were at that time printing Polybius’.
The Three University Presses
The Clarendon Building is not large, and the Press very soon outgrowing it was partly housed in various adjacent buildings, until in 1826-30 the present Press in Walton Street was erected. It is remarkable that though the building is more like a college than a factory—it is of the quadrangular plan regular in Oxford—and was built when printing was still mainly a handicraft, it has been found possible to adapt its solid fabric and spacious rooms to modern processes with very little structural alteration. Extensive additions, however, have been and are even now being made.
The activities of the nineteenth century are too various to detail; but a few outstanding facts claim mention. The Bible business continued to prosper, and gained immensely in variety by the introduction of Oxford India paper and by the publication, in conjunction with Cambridge, of the Revised Version of the Old and New Testaments. Earlier in the century there was a period of great activity in the production of editions of the Classics, in which Gaisford played a great part and to which many foreign scholars like Wyttenbach and Dindorf gave their support. Later, in the Secretaryships of Kitchin (for many years afterwards Dean of Durham) and of Bartholomew Price, new ground was broken with the famous Clarendon Press Series of school books by such scholars as Aldis Wright, whose editions of Shakespeare have long served as a quarry for successive editors. The New English Dictionary began to be published in 1884. Meanwhile the manufacturing powers of the Press at Oxford and the selling powers of the publishing house in London were very widely extended by the energies of Mr. Horace Hart and Mr. Henry Frowde, and the foundations were laid of the great and multifarious enterprises which belong to the history of the last twenty years.
THE QUADRANGLE OF THE UNIVERSITY PRESS AT OXFORD
