Some Account of the Oxford University Press, 1468-1921Oxford University Press
History
Some Account of the Oxford University Press, 1468-1921
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press; Printing -- England -- Oxford -- History
The history of the Press in the latter part of the seventeenth century
will always be connected with the name of the second of its great
patrons, Dr. John Fell, Dean of Christ Church and Bishop of Oxford. Fell
made the great collection of type-punches and matrices from which the
beautiful types known by his name are still cast at Oxford; he promoted
the setting up of a paper mill at Wolvercote, where Oxford paper is
still made; he conducted the long, and ultimately successful, struggle
with the Stationers and the King’s Printers, from which the history of
Oxford Bibles and Prayer Books begins (1675). In 1671 he and three others
took over the management of the Press, paying the University £200 a
year and spending themselves a large sum upon its development. Lastly,
it seems that he suggested to Archbishop Sheldon the provision, due to
his munificence, of the new and spacious printing house and _Theatre_
which still bears his name. The Press was installed there in 1669, and
began to issue the long series of books which bear the imprint _Oxoniae
e Theatro Sheldoniano_, or in the vulgar tongue _Oxford at the Theater_.
These imprints, indeed, were still used, at times, long after the Press
had been moved from the Sheldonian to its next home in the Clarendon
Building. Many learned folios were printed at this time, including
pioneer work by Oxford students of Oriental languages; the book best
remembered to-day is no doubt Anthony Wood’s _Historia et Antiquitates
Universitatis Oxoniensis_ published in 1674.
To this period belongs also the first exercise of the privilege to print
Bibles and Prayer Books, which was recognized, as we have seen, at least
as early as 1637, when the Stationers’ Company paid the University to
refrain from printing Bibles. This agreement lasted until 1642, and, by
renewal at intervals, until 1672, when it was at length denounced; and in
1675 a quarto English Bible was printed _at the Theater_, and a beginning
made of what has become an extensive and highly technical process of
manufacture and distribution.
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