A History of Cambridge University Press: Volume 2, Scholarship and Commerce, 1698–1872

This second volume of the history of Cambridge University Press deals with a period of fundamental changes in printing, publishing, and bookselling. The purpose of this book is not only to chronicle the history of the Press, but also to set it in this context of change: to examine how the forces of commerce collided with the hopes or demands of scholarship and education, and how, in the end, one was made to exploit the other. The volume opens with the new arrangements made by the University for printing in Cambridge in the 1690s, and closes on the eve of the opening of new premises in London. In the first years, the leading figure was Richard Bentley, whose controversial part in the activities of the Press was critical to its fortunes. As always, the success of the Press depended on London and the London book trade. This book explores the changing nature of this relationship, and the extent to which the University Press also became an international publisher.

• The second volume in a three-volume history of the world’s oldest Press • Covers a period of fundamental change in printing, publishing, and bookselling • Sets the story of the Press in a wide social and economic context, particularly in discussing the London book trade

List of illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Note on currency; 1. A world for books; 2. Changes to books and the book trade; 3. Founding a new press; 4. Crownfield, authors and the book trade; 5. Crownfield’s later years; 6. The mid eighteenth-century printing house; 7. Booksellers and authors; 8. Bentham and Bibles; 9. Baskerville and Bentham; 10. An age of ferment; 11. John Archdeacon; 12. John Burges; 13. Richard Watts and the beginning of stereotyping; 14. Hellenism and John Smith; 15. John Smith; 16. John Parker: London publisher and Cambridge printer; 17. Enterprise, authors and learning; 18. Partnership; 19. Macmillan; 20. Opening in London; Appendix; Notes; Index.

‘Exhaustively researched and taking the reader through a social and technological revolution, this second volume is hugely impressive.’ Cambridge: The Magazine of the Cambridge Society

‘Not for nothing is Cambridge now regarded as one of the world’s pre-eminent academic publishers. An advantage of the kind of long view taken here is an ability to convey a sense of the way in which such an imprint attains, over generations, the level of recognition that makes it what it is today. … Academic editors everywhere should read this volume. … At a moment when there appears to be increasing anxiety in certain quarters about the commercialization of academic publishing, this book comes as a timely reminder that it was ever thus.’ Times Literary Supplement