Oxford University Press - 19th Century: Price and Cannan

19th Century: Price and Cannan

The Press now 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. The Press was the product of "a society of shy hypochondriacs," as one historian put it. Its trade relied on mass sales of cheap bibles, and its Delegates were typified by Gaisford or Martin Routh. They were long-serving classicists, presiding over a learned business that printed 5 or 10 titles each year, such as Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon (1843), and they displayed little or no desire to expand its trade. Steam power for printing must have seemed an unsettling departure in the 1830s.

At this time, Thomas Combe joined the Press and became the university's Printer until his death in 1872. Combe was a better business man 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. Even so, Combe earned a fortune through his shares in the business and the acquisition and renovation of the bankrupt paper mill at Wolvercote. He funded schooling at the Press and the endowment of St. Barnabas Church in Oxford. Combe's wealth also extended to becoming the first patron of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and he and his wife Martha bought most of the group's early work, including The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt. Combe showed little interest, however, in producing fine printed work at the Press. The most well-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.

It took the 1850 Royal Commission on the workings of the university and a new Secretary, Bartholomew Price, to shake up the Press. 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 in 1866 helped Price to create the Clarendon Press series of cheap, elementary schoolbooks – perhaps the first time that Oxford used the Clarendon imprint. Under Price, the Press began to take on its modern shape. By 1865 the Delegacy had ceased to be 'perpetual,' and evolved into five perpetual and five junior posts filled by appointment from the University, with the Vice Chancellor a Delegate ex officio: a hothouse for factionalism that Price deftly tended and controlled. The university bought back shares as their holders retired or died. Accounts' supervision passed to the newly created Finance Committee in 1867. Major new lines of work began. To give one 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.

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. Macmillan's contract ended in 1880, and wasn't renewed. By this time, Oxford also had a London warehouse for bible stock in Paternoster Row, and in 1880 its manager Henry Frowde 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. "Very few of us here in Oxford had any personal knowledge of him," admitted one obituary in Oxford's staff magazine, "The Clarendonian". 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 and playing a key role in setting up the Press's first office outside Britain, in New York in 1896.

Price transformed OUP. In 1884, the year he retired as Secretary, the Delegates bought back the last shares in the business. 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. Simply put, 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 huge project that became the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

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 10 years and to cost approximately £9,000. Both figures were wildly optimistic. The Dictionary began to appear in print in 1884, but the first edition was not completed until 1928, 13 years after Murray's death, at a cost of around £375,000. This vast financial burden and its implications landed on Price's successors.

The next Secretary struggled to address this problem. Philip Lyttelton Gell was appointed by the Vice-Chancellor Benjamin Jowett in 1884. Despite his education at Balliol and a background in London publishing, Gell found the operations of the Press incomprehensible. The Delegates began to work around him, and the university finally dismissed Gell in 1897. The Assistant Secretary, Charles Cannan, took over with little fuss and even less affection for his predecessor: "Gell was always here, but I cannot make out what he did."

Cannan had little opportunity for public wit in his new role. An acutely gifted classicist, he came to the head of a business that was successful in traditional terms but now moved into uncharted terrain. By themselves, specialist academic works and the undependable bible trade could not meet the rising costs of the Dictionary and Press contributions to the University Chest. To meet these demands, OUP needed much more revenue. Cannan set out to obtain it. Outflanking university politics and inertia, he made Frowde and the London office the financial engine for the whole business. Frowde steered Oxford rapidly into popular literature, acquiring the World's Classics in 1906. The same year saw him enter into a so-called "joint venture" with Hodder & Stoughton to help with the publication of children's literature and medical books. Cannan insured continuity to these efforts by appointing his Oxford protégé, the Assistant Secretary Humphrey S. Milford, to be Frowde's assistant. Milford became Publisher when Frowde retired in 1913, and ruled over the lucrative London business and the branch offices that reported to it until his own retirement in 1945. Given the financial health of the Press, Cannan ceased to regard scholarly books or even the Dictionary as impossible liabilities. "I do not think the University can produce enough books to ruin us," he remarked.

His efforts were helped by the efficiency of the print shop. Horace Hart was appointed as Controller of the Press at the same time as Gell, but proved far more effective than the Secretary. With extraordinary energy and professionalism, he improved and enlarged Oxford's printing resources, and developed Hart's Rules as the first style guide for Oxford's proof-readers. Subsequently, these became standard in print shops worldwide. In addition, he suggested the idea for the Clarendon Press Institute, a social club for staff in Walton Street. When the Institute opened in 1891, the Press had 540 employees eligible to join it, including apprentices. Finally, Hart's general interest in printing led to him cataloguing the "Fell Types", then using them in a series of Tudor and Stuart facsimile volumes for the Press, before ill health led to his death in 1915. By then, OUP had moved from being a parochial printer into a wide-ranging, university-owned publishing house with a growing international presence.