The main building of the Oxford Press, erected 1826-30, consists of three sides of a quadrangle. The two main wings, each of three floors, are still known as the _Learned Side_ and the _Bible Side_, though their appropriation to Bibles and secular books has long since ceased in fact. On the Learned Side are the hand composing rooms, both the book department and the jobbing department, where some readers and compositors are employed in setting up the official papers of the University, examination papers, and other miscellaneous work, and the more difficult and complicated books produced for the Delegates or other publishers. [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] The total quantity of type in the Press is estimated at over one million pounds of metal, and includes some 550 different founts of type in some 150 different characters, ranging from the hieroglyphic and the prehistoric ‘Minoan’ (cast to record Sir Arthur Evans’s discoveries), to the phonetic scripts of Sweet and Passy; and including Sanskrit, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Amharic, Coptic, Armenian, Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, Sinhalese, Tamil, Gothic, Cyrillic. Here, too, are the famous Fell types acquired by the University about 1667. These are virtually the same as the founts from which were printed the first edition of _The Faerie Queene_ and the First Folio Shakespeare; and their beauty makes them still the envy of printers all the world over. Here compositors are still daily engaged in setting the Oxford Dictionary (with its twenty-one different sizes or characters of type), which has been slowly growing since 1882. One compositor has a record of thirty-eight years’ continuous work on the Dictionary. In part of the same wing is the _Delegates’ Warehouse_. Here, and in a number of annexes, including the old _Delegates’ School_ built about 1840, repose the oldest and most durable of the Delegates’ publications. They are stored for the most part in lofty stacks of unfolded sheets, like the piers of a Norman crypt. From these vaults was drawn into the upper air, in 1907, the last copy of Wilkins’s _Coptic New Testament_, published in 1716, the paper hardly discoloured and the impression still black and brilliant. It is estimated that these warehouses contain some three and a half million copies of about four thousand five hundred distinct books. [Illustration: Ancient Oak Frames in one of the Composing Rooms] [Illustration: The Upper Composing Room] [Illustration: Monotype Casters] [Illustration: Ink-making] [Illustration: The Old Machine Room] [Illustration: A Perfecting Machine with Self-feeder] [Illustration: The Old Bindery (now a Warehouse)] [Illustration: One of the Warehouses]