The History of

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Oxford University Press

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1896–1970

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VOLUME III

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GENERAL EDITOR Simon Eliot

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EDITED BY Wm. Roger Louis

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2013 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1

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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America

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ISBN 978–0–19–956840–6

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

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Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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Introduction

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The Evolution of the Press over a Critical Three-Quarters of a Century, from the 1890s to the 1970s

N the seventy-five years from the mid-1890s to the end of the 1960s the structure, scale, and character of Oxford University Press changed radically, yet in some ways remained basically the same. The phrase ‘the Press’ at any particular time could range in meaning from the worldwide publishing business to, specifically, the Clarendon Press, which in the early part of the century was managed by Charles Cannan. Cannan was the mastermind of the Press as we know it today. He held the title Secretary to the Delegates for twenty-one years, 1898 to 1919. Like all his immediate successors, Cannan was a classicist. He was reputed to be the only person who could define the actuality of the Clarendon Press, but he had such a formidable personality that no one dared ask what it was. In Oxford college circles, the purpose of the Press was generally if only vaguely known: to publish original works of scholarship, regardless of their profitability. The Press was thus fundamentally different from a trade publisher like Macmillan or Longmans. Yet Cannan and his colleagues, then and later, expected the Press to be run as skilfully and as profitably as its commercial rivals. There was a consistent pattern. The Press expanded worldwide through tumultuous periods, including two world wars, the Great Depression, and the twenty-five-year economic boom after 1945. Yet it remained steady in function and purpose. Some of the officers of the Press served for more than four decades, and some of the workforce for more than five. Cannan would have felt at home in the Press as it was in the 1960s, with its international economic structure and its essentially unchanged Walton Street quadrangle and duck pond. But no one in the early twentieth century could have predicted the scale of production in subsequent decades, amounting to more than 17,000 titles in stock by 1970. Of those, the Press kept available ones that might sell only a half-dozen copies each year—a sign of commitment that Cannan would have found natural. The number of new annual titles was about fifty in Cannan’s time, compared with 850 in the 1960s. By contrast Cambridge University Press published 250 at most. The character of the Press had begun to change as well, though the transformation was gradual. Colin Roberts, Cannan’s linear successor in the 1950s and onwards to the 1970s,

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implicitly embraced commercial principles that ever more committed the Press to mass production, which led to an inevitable decline in OUP’s famous craftsmanship and aesthetic typography. The University of Oxford, which owns the Press, classifies it as a mere department. Yet to those who have any idea of its scale of production and profits, it is as significant to Oxford’s international reputation as the University itself. There was an enduring tension in the three-quarters of a century covered by this volume. It centred on whether the Press should make an annual financial contribution to the University. Cannan’s purpose was to build a wall, figurative but as real as possible, between Walton Street and the rest of Oxford. He aimed to prevent, as he referred to it in one of a variety of pejorative phrases, ‘profit plundering’. Cannan could be convivial. Though he regarded the University as the equivalent of a hostile government, he got on well with the Delegates appointed by the University to oversee the Press. He often won them over to his fixed purpose of sustaining the Press’s administrative and financial autonomy. In the Cannan tradition, the Press increasingly became, in the view of later critics, an institution apart from the University and accountable only to itself. Its chief characteristic, in a recurrent phrase, was one of ‘excessive secrecy’. Cannan maintained control of each unit of the Press through delegation of authority. The nature of the system can perhaps best be illustrated by a comparison with Cambridge University Press. Cambridge had but one major branch, in New York City. The Syndics, or governing body in Cambridge, held it under their direct supervision. Oxford had branches not only in New York and the ‘Old Dominions’ of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but also in India, South East Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world. The branches usually reported to the head of the office in London, who in turn was responsible to the Secretary. As emphasized in one of the chapters, the Cambridge Press had a system controlled from the top, while the Oxford Press was organized autonomously. Cannan dealt with the different parts of the Press as separate fiefdoms, each having little to do with the others. In later decades each unit continued to operate with a significant degree of self-sufficiency. The chain of command still led indirectly to the Secretary himself. There were ten Delegates. Five were ‘Perpetual’, that is, permanent, with their tenure ending only when they died or reached the age of 75. A couple of Delegates served as many as three decades. One principal function of the Delegacy was to assess proposals for books. The Delegates consistently proved to be good judges of manuscripts and potential authors, in a complicated but certainly an undeceived manner. In the later period Helen Gardner was the first woman Delegate. She served for fifteen years (1959–74) and was especially hardworking in the field of English literature. A partial list of her fellow Delegates will give examples of subjects and length of service: K. C. Wheare (constitutional expert), 19 years; J. R. Hicks (economics), 17; C. M. Bowra (Classics), 17; H. L. A. Hart (law), 13; Henry Chadwick (theology), 13; and Ronald Syme (Classics), 12. Slightly earlier, C. N. Hinshelwood (the Nobel Prize-winning chemist) was one of two Delegates who served for more than three decades, in his case thirty-three years. Hinshelwood represented the general field of science—then considered to be a controversial subject. As will be seen, one of the major criticisms levelled against the Press

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was the failure to keep pace in science with Cambridge University Press. Scientists in Oxford, so it was alleged, were second-class members of a university biased towards the humanities. Was science in turn a second-class subject in the view of the Press? Since it is an important theme, the answer will be found in several of the chapters. The lag in science publishing imperilled the Press’s general reputation. David Ross was the other Delegate who served for three decades (1922–52). Ross was a philosopher, a Scot with such a fine sense of irony that it often went undetected because he lacked a sense of humour (in one borderline case, he said he failed to understand fancy words: the word he had in mind was the description of the Press as a ‘conglomerate’). Before and after the Second World War, Ross helped the Press weather a storm stirred up in part by another Delegate, Hugh Last, a classicist. Last had served for five years before resigning in 1937 in protest against secrecy and lack of accountability. The Press usually held the loyalty of the Delegates. Last was an extreme exception. He believed the Press to be guilty of sleight of hand, even dishonesty, in failing to provide the University with full and detailed financial records. In what today would be called a lack of transparency, the Press revealed as little as possible, on the grounds that disclosing confidential financial information to an academic committee would be the equivalent of publishing it in a London newspaper. In retrospect Last’s demands for financial disclosure would today seem sensible, even compelling, but at the time the Press, along with almost all other Delegates, believed Last to be unreasonable and indeed treacherous—strong language, but the ‘rumpus’, as it was called, roused powerful emotions. Besides judging manuscripts, the other principal duty of the Delegacy was to provide financial advice. None of the Delegates had direct business experience. But one of them, J. H. C. ‘Jack’ Thompson of Wadham College, was a mathematician who possessed an unrivalled knack for mastering business complexities, for example, the worldwide fluctuation in book prices in an era of devaluation and a weakening of the pound sterling. Thompson was a Delegate for more than two decades (1953–74), serving as chairman of the Finance Committee, the inner ring of the Delegacy. He later addressed himself to the problem of wealth within the University, largely inventing the system of taxing the richer colleges to help the poorer. One Vice-Chancellor, Alan Bullock, consequently remarked that he was the unsung hero of the University. In the 1960s Colin Roberts relied on Thompson for financial judgement as well as a grasp of intricate economic detail. Thompson worked well with his fellow Delegates. Maurice Bowra—still projecting a Brideshead aura but in fact a conscientious Delegate (1954 to his death in 1971) —once wrote of Thompson that ‘he gave me the warm shoulder’. Thompson believed that the key to the Press’s financial success could be found in London. The London Business, as OUP London was commonly called within the Press, had its beginnings as a bible and prayer book warehouse. Over the course of the nineteenth century it emerged as a commercial venture in its own right, and indeed Henry Frowde, its head beginning in 1883, took the initiative in creating the office in New York in 1896. There was a problem of nomenclature. The head of the London office was known as the Publisher. To the world at large, it was widely assumed that the

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Publisher must be in charge of the Press, whereas overall control rested categorically with the Secretary in Oxford. But the Publisher gradually took initiatives that would have been impossible for the Secretary. The purpose of the Clarendon Press was to publish learned works. OUP London produced books of interest to the general reader. In a brilliant appointment, Cannan designated the young Humphrey Milford to succeed Frowde. Milford served in London for nearly four decades, 1906–45. His interests included scholarly works but extended far beyond to embrace a remarkable range of subjects, including children’s books and music. If there is a single figure in the history of the Press who can be described as a publishing genius, it is certainly Milford. He developed the London Business into a competitive publishing house with an eclectic, intellectually engaging list. It reflected his discerning management as well as his literary and historical taste. He possessed an unquenchable interest in such diverse subjects as classic fiction, international affairs, and medicine. As will be seen, he had a creative vision, though one rarely expressed in writing, that included academic books comprehensible to the general reader—what were later called ‘crossover books’—and other works such as educational books, economic surveys, and poetry. Milford gave the London Business an intellectual vitality acknowledged by the public as well as other publishers. It is entirely understandable that, to the public at large, the heart of Oxford University Press was in London. To those involved in the manufacturing side of the Press, the centre was obviously in Oxford. A three-pronged business, the Press produced its own paper, and it printed as well as published its own books. It was unique among all presses, university and commercial, in having its own paper mill, a factory in Wolvercote recognizable at a distance by its distinctive chimney. In Walton Street both the printing and publishing parts of the business were in the same building. The modernization of the paper mill and printing works began long before the Cannan era. Charles Dodgson’s lines ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! | How I wonder what you’re at!’ referred to one of Cannan’s predecessors, Bartholomew ‘Bat’ Price (Secretary for two decades, 1864–84). Price left a tradition of innovative and strong organizational control reinforced by a deft knowledge of University politics. Like Thompson, Price was a mathematician who understood business as well as academic complexities. He witnessed the beginning of the industrial resurgence of the Press in the late nineteenth century, which was no less than a technological revolution. Horace Hart, Printer to the University for more than three decades, 1883–1915, retooled old equipment and installed new printing presses and other up-to-date machinery. Hart was destined for an immortality of sorts when, in 1893, he drew up a memorandum that eventually became Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers. He regimented and disciplined the workforce of 650 employees (compared with 930 in the 1960s). Perhaps partly as a consequence of the Hart regime, the craftsmen and other workers took collective, cocky, and occasionally boisterous pride in their work. In the period between the two world wars and beyond, the dominant figure at the Printing House was John Johnson, who held the title Printer to the University for two decades, 1925–46. Johnson believed the Printer was, or should be, equal in rank and authority

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to the Secretary and the Publisher. Tyrannical, shrewd, and practical, he demanded exact as well as aesthetic typography and binding with a uniform Clarendon crest of gold on the spine, often with striking navy blue covers. He became one of Oxford’s master printers and industrial managers. He conspired with Hugh Last, writing directly to the Vice-Chancellor in a quest for accountability, reform, and equality of status. Johnson’s drive to assert the authority of the Printer became an obsession. During the Second World War he became the vital figure in printing secret codebooks and documents for the Admiralty, emerging as an acknowledged hero of the wartime effort. The diversity of publications can be followed in the individual chapters, for example, on children’s books and music as well as schoolbooks. In educational books especially, Milford’s hand again becomes apparent. He had the intuition that he should give a blanket instruction to a young member of his staff. He spoke to Eric Parnwell, who was occasionally bewildered by Milford’s questions to him in Latin. Milford asked him to think about books that would assist children throughout the world to learn English as a second language. Such was the origin of Parnwell’s many trips to Asia and Africa, and such was the beginning of English Language Teaching—the key component of the Press’s eventual economic success to the present. Parnwell and others of the London staff were paternalistic, as is apparent from the books of the time, but one of the reasons for their sustained achievement was their vision of education. Helping children read led to a belief in racial equality. The ideals of the Press developed along with those of the British Empire and Commonwealth. The international growth of the Press will be clear from the sequence of chapters. Chapter 1 is a sustained introductory comment pursuing the volume’s common themes of modernization and expansion. No one in the early part of the century would have recognized the year 1896 as having symbolic importance. Yet it was the creation of the New York office, at first no more than an agency, that led to further development globally. The growth was by no means inevitable or smooth. The branch in New York nearly closed down as a consequence of the Great Depression, but was saved mainly by the continued sale of bibles. Canada (1904) proved to be so problematical in its financial losses and management that it was referred to in Walton Street as a ‘branchlet’ causing pain in inverse ratio to its size. Australia (1908) became profitable and attracted worldwide attention in a later period when the manager, Frank Eyre, sold more than a million copies of the Oxford English Course for Papua and New Guinea. When it came to New Zealand, the Press met stout resistance to the principle of delegated or indirect control, especially if Australia happened to occupy the intermediary position. New Zealand eventually became a separate branch (1947), though it remained relatively small. The country became conspicuous in the history of the Press in another way. Such was the number of New Zealanders working at the Clarendon Press and OUP London that they later became known as the Kiwi mafia. India (1912) became a major component of the Press. One of its principal figures was Roy Hawkins, who worked in India for his entire career, four decades, from 1930 until his retirement in 1970. ‘The Hawk’, as he was known, secured the finances of the branch by publishing such works as Jim Corbett’s books on big-game hunting, for

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example Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944). Hawkins managed to sell Clarendon books as well as Indian schoolbooks, and to publish works on Indian history, religion, and culture. By contrast, OUP Pakistan (1952) was precarious from the beginning, despite significant trade potential in the former provinces of northern India. Schoolbooks called Crescent Readers in time helped OUP Pakistan to become a profitable branch, though in one year the only way it could turn a meagre profit was by collecting insurance money (from a flood, the mark of which remained on books sold many years subsequently). OUP Pakistan’s publications in Urdu eventually had an influence in the Middle East and indeed throughout the Muslim world. In Malaya (1957) and East Asia generally, the antecedents could be found in three distinct regions, South East Asia (above all Singapore), China, and Japan. The manager was Raymond Brammah, renowned for his sophisticated organizational skills. He served in South East Asia itself for most of his thirty-five-year tenure, 1955–90. Brammah learned Malay, relished the local culture, and held a precarious balance between South East Asia, Japan, and Hong Kong. In Africa the pattern developed differently, with separate branches in the western, eastern, and southern parts of the continent—for example, Nigeria (1954), Kenya (1954), and South Africa. The founding of the Cape Town branch in 1915 was in a much earlier period, at the beginning of the Press’s international expansion. Half a century later, in 1970, the Press set off an eventual firestorm in South Africa by deciding to publish The Oxford History of South Africa with a chapter of blank pages, thus seeming to censure apartheid. As the reader will discover, the motive was more humdrum but nevertheless important: to stay within South African law while not being ‘cowardly or dishonourable’ by omitting a chapter that would otherwise have been censored. The gravitational pull of the volume is towards the discussion of books published during the seventy-five-year period. The Press consistently attempted to uphold standards of scholarly excellence. Yet internally the Secretaries and editors recognized varieties or degrees of excellence, or to put it differently, they regarded some books as having unusual distinction. Here is a short version of a list compiled by a senior editor, Peter Sutcliffe, who served at the Press for nearly four decades, 1949–87. He draws attention to the inspiration of the Secretaries themselves in inventing new series, specifically Charles Cannan and Kenneth Sisam. Sisam worked at the Press from 1922 and served as Secretary during the critical years 1942–6 (he was also rather the Godfather of the New Zealand contingent). Sutcliffe’s list is significant as an insider’s assessment of outstanding books and series, written for the purpose of informing other insiders, for example, new Delegates: Schoolbooks (Clarendon Press Series). Sustained the Press from 1860 pretty well until the end of the century.

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Oxford Book of English Verse, 1900. Quiller-Couch (Charles Cannan’s idea), first deviation from the [Clarendon] principle of publishing exclusively learned or educational books. A best seller. First of many ‘Oxford Books’.

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IN T RODUC T ION Oxford English Dictionary, 1884–1927. Dictionary of National Biography. Donated by the family of George Smith 1917. First published 1882–1900. Great responsibility. Press has kept up decennial volumes. Oxford Classical Texts, 1900– . A uniquely valuable series. Oxford English Texts. Authoritative, scholarly editions of all the major writers.

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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1906. Anne Brontë. The first Oxford title in the World’s Classics series acquired by OUP. The series goes on to include Anthony Trollope’s novels and translations of War & Peace, Confucius, and other classics.

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Oxford Companion to English Literature, 1930. Sir Paul Harvey. First of many companions and reference books. (The idea was Kenneth Sisam’s.)

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The Oxford Lectern Bible, 1935. Designed for use in the chapel at the Canadian War Memorial at Ypres, this is regarded as the outstanding piece of Bible printing in Oxford’s history.

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The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of English, 1945. A. S. Hornby. The most widely-used work on English language teaching courses around the world is also Oxford’s all-time best-selling language title.

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Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia, 1948–56. Edited by Laura Salt.

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James Joyce, 1959. Richard Ellmann. Published by OUP New York, this is perhaps the greatest single-volume biography written in the 20th century.

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Oxford History of England, 1934–1965. Edited by Sir George Clark. The last volume by A. J. P. Taylor is an unqualified success.

Unfortunately for the historian, Sutcliffe appears never to have composed a comparable list of what he regarded as failures. By the 1960s, despite the injunction to publish scholarly books even though they might not turn a profit, he and his fellow editors tended to regard titles not selling more than 300 copies as ‘mistakes’. The Press in the 1960s began to draw fire from critics. It held elite status as part of the ‘Establishment’, but why did there seem to be no accountability? In part such questions arose from the searching inquiry into the problems of the University itself. Oliver Franks, the philosopher and statesman who headed the inquiry, recommended a similar investigation into the affairs of the Press. A committee was appointed in 1967 and reported three years later. The chairman was Humphrey Waldock, a professor of international law at All Souls College who later became President of the International Court of Justice. The committee reached conclusions that were remarkably similar

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to the lines of Hugh Last’s criticism in the 1930s: the Press was shrouded in secrecy and failed to provide sufficient financial accountability to the University. After the publication of the committee’s report in May 1970, the Press without undue dismay accepted its recommendations to expand the number of Delegates from ten to fifteen, thus making it more representative, and to submit detailed financial records to the University. Though critical and comprehensive in its recommendations, the report in fact was a resounding vindication of the Press. The Waldock Report confirmed reforms already in progress, mainly those initiated by Colin Roberts, who consequently holds a place in the history of the Press as a determined and skilful reformer. By the late 1960s the administrative, day-to-day business of the Press was concentrated to an extraordinary extent in only three men: Colin Roberts, Jack Thompson, and Dan Davin, the chief editor. As a worldwide enterprise, the Press had outgrown the capacity of such limited management, no matter how able. What the reader will find of interest is the tension between the Press and the Waldock Committee as well as the part played by certain individuals, for example, Rex Richards, a scientist who later became Vice-Chancellor. Richards believed the Press to be generally inefficient and haughty as well as lagging behind in the field of science. Over and beyond the clash of individuals, there were two incompatible visions of the Press. One was espoused by the head of OUP London, Sir John ‘Bruno’ Brown, the other by Roberts. Brown thought that the future of the Press lay with the continued development of the London Business as a commercial venture competing with the great publishing houses of London. So also, at least implicitly, did the members of the Waldock Committee. Roberts and Davin held the opposite view. They believed that the future lay in fusing the two parts of the business, with London eventually moving to Oxford. They thus anticipated the closing down of the London office and the move towards amalgamation in Oxford in the 1970s. The historian G. M. Young once said that being published by the Oxford Press was like being married to a duchess: ‘the honour is almost greater than the pleasure.’ The crucial word was the qualification ‘almost’. Young believed that satisfaction was still paramount despite the Press’s reputation for slowness and the failure to publicize individual titles (the lack of publicity led one OUP author to refer to ‘my secret book’). The gratification on the part of authors could be explained in part by conscientious editing and suggestions for improvement, sometimes merely on points of detail but sometimes also in clarification of argument and logical arrangement of narrative. The manuscript then progressed (in the case of books printed in Walton Street) on to the Printing House and to the ‘Learned readers’—the skilled craftsmen who scrutinized the text for error and inconsistency. In a supreme compliment to the learned readers, the publisher Grant Richards pointed out the crucial part they played in maintaining high standards. In the preface to his book on the poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman (1941), Richards wrote: I have in my time sent hundreds and hundreds of books to press and I should therefore much like to add here my tribute to the extreme care and the unusual intelligence shown by the ‘readers’ of the Oxford University Press.

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IN T RODUC T ION My book [on Housman] has, of course, been child’s play compared to the sort of thing which often engages their energies, but still I have been surprised by their knowledge and by the almost meticulous care which they have brought to bear on small questions which have arisen.

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The sting was with the qualification (as with G. M. Young’s use of the same word ‘almost’): the phrase ‘almost meticulous care’ revealed the tension between the Press and authors that was almost always present. Sometimes authors objected fiercely to changes even of commas, or, more exactly, especially commas. In the end the house style of the Press prevailed over authors’ preferences or eccentricities, not without disgruntlement on the part of some authors. The editorial procedure gave some authors the conviction that the Press brought out the best in them and indeed inspired further research and writing. As if in protest against the impending, pervasive influence of the computer, Peter and Iona Opie, the editors of the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951), wrote in 1967 in evidence submitted to the Waldock Committee:

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At the Clarendon Press a book is still treated as being a book … Inevitably it gives the Press a reputation for being fussy, impersonal, and slow-moving … But it is an attitude highly conducive to producing the best work of which a person is capable. When an Oxford book is in hand there is a general air in Walton Street that the reputation of the Press is at stake.

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Yet there were also frustrations, not only about slowness of production but also about such things as royalties and advances. The Clarendon Press seldom offered advances, and OUP London and OUP New York were often unable to match aggressive offers by commercial presses. Royalties were competitive but advances were often not. There was also the question of initiative and recruitment. It became clear during the Waldock investigation that OUP editors were passive in comparison with active solicitation on the part of commercial rivals. In Oxford itself, representatives from the London publishing houses expressed an interest in the work of prospective authors while the Clarendon Press simply waited for manuscripts to arrive in Walton Street. To give but one example from the 1960s, the young historian Keith Thomas was recruited by Weidenfeld & Nicolson mainly because the historian Eric Hobsbawm acted as Weidenfeld’s talent scout. Thomas felt flattered that someone was curious about his work. Religion and the Decline of Magic was thus published in 1971 by a London publishing house. Thomas did not feel that he had made an inferior choice. Weidenfeld also published works by Isaiah Berlin and Hugh Trevor-Roper. These are only limited examples, but they indicate that the Clarendon Press failed to enlist some of the outstanding scholars of the era. In the case of Thomas, Colin Roberts was a member of the same Oxford college, St John’s. Apparently it never occurred to him to ask Thomas about the possibility of the Clarendon Press publishing his book. OUP royalties were the same as standard commercial royalties: 10 per cent of the published price on the first 5,000 copies sold, 12.5 per cent on the next 5,000, and 15 per

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cent thereafter on hardcover books, while with paperbacks the rate was 6 per cent of the published price on the first 25,000 copies and 7.5 per cent thereafter. Commercial presses had the latitude to offer higher rates, against which OUP did not compete, nor did the Clarendon Press attempt to match commercial advances. Indeed in Oxford if not at OUP London there was a lingering attitude of disdain towards advances. The integrity of the Clarendon Press compelled it, in the view of Roberts and Davin, not to descend to commercial inducement. Such views began to change only slowly, mainly in the late 1960s. Until then, on such matters as projecting costs and setting prices as well as offering advances, the Clarendon Press was antiquated in its business methods. Colin Roberts adjusted the prices of books according to what he believed Oxford dons could afford, while Dan Davin made decisions on print runs based on intuition and guesswork. In fact both Roberts and Davin were shrewd and practical, but both were vulnerable to criticism of the Waldock Committee that those methods were hardly in line with up-to-date, efficient business procedures. There were two principal reasons for the rapidly changing publishing circumstances of the 1960s. The first was the expansion of the universities, which created a larger market for academic books and, especially, paperbacks. The second was the arrival of the American conglomerates in London and the pumping of American money into London publishing houses, thus bringing about tumultuous change in the world of books. But the turmoil of the 1960s was merely prelude to the even greater upheaval of the 1970s. The decade of the 1970s was the era of ever-greater mergers, agents becoming more commercial, and skyrocketing advances. Consequently, and only in the wake of the Waldock Report, the Press launched internal inquiries into the financing of its publications and systematically began to come to grips with such problems as the commissioning of books, discounting, remaindering, and pulping— and, on a greater scale of importance, pricing to the market rather than to cost, and reducing stock levels. In the 1960s, and even more in the 1970s, the increasing opportunities for instant contracts with small but significant advances caused many scholars to choose commercial presses. In Oxford and Cambridge as elsewhere it seemed to be a rational decision. The quality of scholarly commercial publishing was high, and publishers were willing to place footnotes at the bottom of the page. Yet Oxford University Press held its own. An OUP contract, not easy to win, assured an impeccable standard of scholarly publication, and—of overriding importance to many scholarly writers—prestige. Authors took pride in being a ‘Clarendonian’. Perhaps the mystique of the Clarendon Press was best conveyed by Gordon Craig, the historian of Germany and a committed Clarendon author, when he reported to the Waldock Committee a conversation with a student: ‘wistfully, he looked at the dark blue covers and the gold seal’: the student’s ambition in life was to have his own book published by the Clarendon Press. As will be clear, the emphasis in these introductory comments has been not only on an explanation of the workings and mystique of the Clarendon Press but also on the decades of service by Delegates and officers of the Press. If one includes his time as Delegate, Roberts served the Press for nearly three decades, 1946–74. Davin’s tenure

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was thirty-three years, 1946–78. Davin, another of OUP’s New Zealanders, is perhaps the most controversial figure in the volume. He is still within living memory of those with actual experience of the Press in the 1960s and 1970s. Regarded by some as heroic in stature because he upheld the traditional standards of the Press, he was to others a throwback to another age. He had distinguished military experience during the Second World War. Referring to the University as ‘the enemy’ was thus even more habitual to him than it had been to Cannan. Davin believed that the Press had sold its soul to a managerial and mechanistic devil whose personality found expression in the computer. Davin had witnessed, in his own view, commercialization and impersonalization along with a lowering of academic standards brought about by the increasing number of books accepted by the Delegates. He thought that the titles published each year should be limited to the total that the editors could carefully read. Davin was loyal. He supported Roberts. He gave lip service to the recommendations of the Waldock Report. But privately he held a different outlook. To him, the end of the 1960s was significant not only because of the obvious change in the world of publishing (above all because of the danger that OUP authors might be lured away by commercial advances) but also because the Press had not resisted the Waldock Committee. The Press had failed to fight, in his own phrase, a determined rearguard action. To Davin, the old Clarendon Press as he had known it— marked not only by the scrupulous upholding of academic standards but also by the intricate craftsmanship of the books themselves—died about 1970. Yet in historical perspective the year 1970 does not represent a termination or death but rather marks the beginning of a new era and the gradual transfiguration of the modern Oxford University Press as it exists today.

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