The Role of the University Press
JEREMY MYNOTT MA PhD
Managing Director of the Publishing Division of the University Press
Cambridge University Press is the printing and publishing house of the University of Cambridge. It is an integral part of the University and has similar charitable objectives in advancing 'education, religion, learning and research'. For centuries the Press has extended the research and teaching activities of the University by making available worldwide through its printing and publishing a remarkable range of academic and educational books, journals, examination papers, and Bibles. For millions of people around the globe the publications of the Press are the only link they ever have with the University of Cambridge.
Ancient and Modern
The Press is both very ancient and very modern. It is in fact the oldest printing and publishing house in the world. It was founded on a royal charter granted to the University by Henry VIII in 1534 and has been operating continuously as a printing and publishing business since the first Cambridge book was printed in 1584. Since then, books under Cambridge University's imprint have appeared in each and every year, and its Press has grown to become one of the largest academic and educational publishers in the world, publishing some 1,500 books and 125 journals a year, which are sold to over 190 countries across the globe.
Richard Bentley
Some Famous Books and Authors
The Press has over the years published works by many famous scholars associated with the [University]. Authors before 1800 included Henry More, John Milton, William Harvey, Richard Bentley, Isaac Newton, and Sir Thomas Browne. And from the late-nineteenth century the volume and range rapidly extended. In the sciences a tradition was established which leads from Clerk Maxwell, Rutherford, Eddington, Jeans, Einstein, Schrödinger, Dirac, and Bohr, through to such distinguished modern physicists as Hawking, Penrose, Feynman, and Weinberg. In the humanities there were Russell and Moore in Philosophy, Maitland and Acton in History; and the Press has in recent years published such internationally pre-eminent Cambridge figures as John Lyons in Linguistics, Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner in Anthropology, Quentin Skinner, Geoffrey Elton and Steven Runciman in History, John Dunn, W. G. Runciman, and Anthony Giddens in Social and Political Theory, and Grahame Clark and Colin Renfrew in Archaeology.
The Press's journal publishing began in 1893 with the [Journal of Physiology], which remains today one of its largest and most successful journals, alongside such more recent productions like Protein Science, Contemporary European
History, and English Today. In 1912 the Cambridge Modern History inaugurated another distinctive Cambridge genre and there are now more than 25 Cambridge Histories published, as well as other large-scale multi-volume works like Needham's Science and Civilisation in China and the scholarly editions of D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, the Darwin Correspondence, and the Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton.
The title page of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica
The Press's schoolbooks publishing began with the Pitt Press series in 1874 and has continued in this century to be associated with curriculum reform movements like the hugely successful School Mathematics Project at one end of the curriculum and the equally innovative Cambridge Latin Course at the other.
The story of the last 25 years is one of phenomenal growth and development. The range of publishing now covers virtually every educational subject seriously studied in the English-speaking world and has recently diversified to include reference works, professional books, Law, Medicine, software, and electronic publishing. The Press has developed one of the most important English Language Teaching programmes of any publisher, including major courses in British English, American English, and Australian English.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia
There is also a fast-expanding general reference programme, including the Cambridge Encyclopedia family of works edited by David Crystal. In all, there are over 12,000 books in print, along with maps, wallcharts, slides, cards, disks, and CDs.
The Printing House
The Printing Division has been through a correspondingly dramatic evolution in the last 150 years. In the 1850s, the University Press was predominantly a printing business, and primarily a printer of Bibles and prayer books. Now, the Press has a large modern Printing House with staff skilled in the newest computerised techniques; it has the first 8-unit colour printing machine in the UK; it handles every kind of work from traditional craft binding to electronic database management; and it produces a vast range of scholarly and educational books and journals, not only for the Press's Publishing Division but also for many other publishers and organisations throughout the world.
The Press as World Publisher
The Press is now in a real sense a 'world publisher'. English is the dominant world language of scholarship and science, and the Press seeks to attract the best authors and publish the best work in the English language worldwide; it currently has over 20,000 authors in 98 countries, including well over 6,000 in the USA (more than 1,000 in California alone), over 1,000 in Australia, and over 100 each in such countries as Japan, Switzerland, Israel, and Sweden. The Press itself publishes and distributes the whole of this varied output through its own network round the world: there are branches in the USA and Australia, each representing the whole list and contributing to it their own related publishing programmes commissioned from the editorial offices in New York, Stanford, and Melbourne; there are sales offices in the major continental European centres, in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with new offices being established most recently in Mexico, Italy, Poland, and Brazil; the Press is also pioneering a scheme to make its best textbooks available in special cheap editions for countries in the developing world, which will no doubt lead to a further expansion of the network.
The Future
The future will see more growth and diversity, as the Press develops a wider range of electronic publications, establishes a presence in new and emerging educational markets, responds to intellectual developments in the subject areas where it is already active, and continuously invests in technological change to improve its production, distribution, and information systems. But the whole of this great expansion remains essentially an organic development, purposefully and directly related to the Press's statutory aims, and realised through a unitary, international printing and publishing organisation, with its physical and its constitutional centre in Cambridge.
Hotlinked images from "A Short History of Cambridge University Press", by Michael Black, photos from the University Library and by Tim Rawles
