In spite of the statement of the Syndics quoted at the end of the preceding chapter, the University Commissioners of 1850-52 reported their opinion that
it is only by associating printers or publishers in some species of co-partnership with the University, or by leasing the Press to them, that any considerable return can hereafter be expected from the capital which has been invested in it ... we are satisfied that no Syndicate, however active and well chosen, can replace the intelligent and vigilant superintendence of those whose fortune in life is dependent upon its success.
Accordingly, on the resignation of Parker, the Syndicate recommended that the university should enter into partnership with "Mr George Seeley of Fleet Street, London, Bookseller, and Mr Charles John Clay, M.A. of Trinity College and of Bread Street Hill, London, Printer," and the grace for the deed of partnership was passed on 3 July, 1854.
The control of the printing thus came into the hands of Mr Clay, whilst Mr Seeley received the sole agency for the sale of Cambridge bibles and prayer-books; Mr Seeley, however, retired two years later and Mr Clay entered into a fresh agreement with the university.
The period of Mr Clay's management was one of great expansion. At the end of his first ten years of office it was estimated that the Press produced about four or five times as much as when he first undertook the management; in 1876, and again in 1886, the Syndics reported to the Senate that the business had attained a considerable magnitude and that large additions had been made to the machinery and plant.
Increase of business naturally demanded increased accommodation and in 1863 a foundry was built upon the site of some old cottages in Black Lion Yard. Eight years later new machine-rooms and warehouses were built on the site of Diamond Court, leading out of Silver Street, and a still larger addition was made in 1877-78, when a three-storied building was erected in the south-west corner of the quadrangle. The most recent additions are the extensions of the warehouse and machine-room on the Silver Street side and the red brick building (containing the syndicate room and secretarial offices), which forms the south side of the quadrangle[138].
In 1882 Mr John Clay, son of Mr C. J. Clay, was admitted into the partnership with the university and from 1886 to 1904 Mr C. F. Clay was also associated with it. Mr John Clay became university printer on his father's retirement in 1895 and held the office until his death in 1916, when the partnership was dissolved and the present printer, Mr J. B. Peace, Fellow of Emmanuel College, was appointed. From 1917 to 1919 the Syndics also employed the services of Mr Bruce Rogers, whose distinguished work as a printer is well known on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the best known figures in the Press in the later half of the nineteenth century was that of Alfred Mason. His remarkable personality dominated the counting-house for a long period and when he died in 1919 he had been for 65 years in the service of the Press.
The present buildings of the Press include machine-rooms, containing large quad royal and quad demy perfectors, revolution presses, and single cylinder machines; a foundry comprising a stereotyping department, an electro-moulding room, an electro-battery room, and two finishing rooms; type storerooms, composing-rooms, and monotype-rooms; an art department for lithographic, half-tone, and other process work; and the warehouse, where the finished sheets are stored ready to be sent away for binding. Every month an average of 40 tons of printed matter leaves the Press to be delivered to London binders.
Printing is done in a wide variety of languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Pali, Coptic, Sanskrit, Hausa, Syriac and Amharic, and the type catalogue makes a volume of about 200 pages.
Perhaps the greatest fame of the Cambridge Press rests upon its mathematical typography. To glance at a page, say, of Principia Mathematica is to realise a little—but only a little—of the minute care and skill required of the compositor, the press-reader, and the machine-minder in the production of such a book. It may be permissible here, perhaps, to quote one recent tribute from the preface to Professor E. W. Brown's Tables of the Motion of the Moon, printed in 1918 for the Yale University Press: