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 work is now carried on by three editors, working independently on
different sections of the alphabet. Dr. Henry Bradley, whose period
of work on the Dictionary now rivals Murray’s in point of time, is by
common consent the greatest of living English philologists. He has
been an editor since 1888. Professor W. A. Craigie, who has been an
editor since 1901, and Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon
since 1916, brings to the work of the Dictionary a rare combination of
qualifications. He is especially eminent as a Scandinavian scholar.
Mr. C. T. Onions, appointed an editor in 1913, has been on the staff
since 1895. He is also known to scholars as the author of the _Oxford
Shakespeare Glossary_ and for his editorial part in _Shakespeare’s
England_.
The London Goldsmiths’ Company contributed £5,000 towards the cost of
the sixth volume of the Dictionary, the title-page of which records
their generous support. Apart from this the whole of the editorial and
manufacturing cost of the work has been borne by the Delegates of the
Press, who have defrayed from their general revenues a heavy annual
outlay for many years. This has necessarily risen since the war, and it
is fortunate that so large a part of the work had been completed under
conditions less onerous than now obtain.
The price of the Dictionary has been kept very low, the sections being
published at the rate of 2_s._ 6_d._ for sixty-four pages or less than
a halfpenny per page containing on an average over 300 lines of type
and nearly 3,000 words. Few books have ever been sold at so low a rate.
The prices of volumes and half volumes stoutly bound in leather have
necessarily been advanced in recent years to meet the enhanced cost
of manufacturing; but the price of the Dictionary is still no more
than nominal, if regard is paid to the outlay precedent to the actual
manufacture of the books. Sections in paper wrappers, issued after 1920,
will be priced at the rate of 5_s._ for sixty-four pages; but it is not
proposed to raise the price of the bulk of the work in this form.
The London _Times_ in 1897 described the Dictionary as ‘the greatest
effort which any University, it may be any printing press, has taken in
hand since the invention of printing.... It will be not the least of the
glories of the University of Oxford to have completed this gigantic task’.
Lord Curzon in his _Letter to the University_ of 1909 wrote: ‘In the
staff of the English Dictionary alone the Press contributes to the
University what is probably the largest single engine of Research working
anywhere at the present time.’
§ 7. _Dictionary of National Biography_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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