Oxford's Ancient Quality Act

At age 500, the University Press just keeps rollin 'along

Fourteen years before Columbus sighted America--in 1478, to be precise --the first book cranked off the press of a printer named Theodoric Rood in Oxford, England. Its title was Expositio Sancti Hieronymi in Symbolum Apostulorum. Its subject was the Apostles' Creed, and it marked the birth of what would become the oldest and most venerable publishing house in the English-speaking world: the Oxford University Press.

Five hundred years later, the press is still in the classics business; Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Book I, for example, is a recent offering. But the Oxford imprint now spans all of human knowledge, from the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary (floccinaucinihilipilification, the act of estimating as worthless) to tomes as obscure as Zoologist Arthur Young's Anatomy of the Nervous System of Octopus Vulgaris, which sells 15 copies a year. The largest academic press in the world, Oxford has 3,000 staffers working in Britain and in 23 overseas branches from New York to Nigeria. It sells some $88 million each year of scholarly treatises, textbooks, reference works, sheet music and Bibles, and its gargantuan list of books in print encompasses 17,000 titles.

In honor of its quincentennial, Oxford has mounted a traveling exhibit of some 250 artifacts and illustrious works from the five centuries. Aptly, since the semi-independent New York branch is Oxford's largest offspring, the exhibit is opening this week at New York's Pierpont Morgan Library, across from Oxford's American headquarters. There, from March 8 through May 7, visitors can gaze at Rood's Expositio, the first Oxford Bible (dated 1675) and A Map of Virginia, With a Description of the Countrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion, written by Captain John Smith of Jamestown fame and published in 1612.

Also on display is the first book printed by the New York branch, a 1909 Scofield Reference Bible (a King James Bible edited by American Evangelical Preacher Cyrus Scofield). Established in 1896, the New York press now specializes in American history and culture, including jazz and black studies. One of its bestselling works: The European Discovery of America (1971. 2 vols.) by the late Samuel Eliot Morison.

For the parent publishing company, headquarters is a somber neoclassical building of yellow Worcester stone on Oxford's Walton Street. An unincorporated business without stockholders, the press is owned by the university, and governed by 19 "delegates," Oxford dons picked for their ability to sift through scholarly manuscripts and select for publication the superior one in ten. The press's entire profits, $7.5 million last year, are plowed back into the production of more books.

For centuries scholarship ranked first and sales a poor second. A Coptic Bible published in 1716 admittedly appealed to a very select audience--primarily theologians. Only 500 copies were run off, and the last did not sell until 1907, a patient 191 years later. Then there was Muller's Certain Variations in the Vocal Organs of the Passeres that have Hitherto Escaped Notice, which Charles Darwin persuaded the press to print in 1878. Fortunately, Darwin was not a publishing executive. In 25 years only 21 volumes were sold.

It was the Bible that made Oxford's fortune. Kings and canons alike were upset by such slipshod jobs as the so-called Wicked Bible of 1631, which contained one of history's worst typos: the word not was omitted from the seventh commandment, making it read, "Thou shall commit adultery." In 1636 the Crown appointed Oxford an official Bible publisher of the realm. (Another was the rival Cambridge University Press, an upstart established in 1521.) While the Bible has been the press's alltime bestseller (countless millions of copies), the delegates view their massive, 13-volume dictionary as their greatest achievement and call it the "repository of the language." Sir James Murray, a Scottish schoolmaster turned philologist, began the project in 1879, amassing the entries of 1,000 word sleuths on index cards. Murray died in 1915, at the letter R, but his staff carried on and in 1928 published the last volume, signing off with zymurgy (the process of fermentation). The final total: 414,825 words.

From that mighty trunk many branches grew--18 versions in all, including concise, condensed and pocket-size models produced under the watchful eyes of 30 lexicographers. Last year Oxford won a lucrative, 32,500-volume order for its concise version when the buyer for a large British chain, wondering if the dictionary was really up to date, demanded to know whether the word streaker (a naked runner) was included. It was.

With inflation doubling printing costs and modern scholars more likely to run off copies of some obscure texts on the Xerox machine than to invest in costly slipcovered volumes, Oxford has been forced to pay attention to balance sheets. "Our overriding concern is to publish learned books," Christ Church Dean Henry Chadwick, a delegate for 19 years, told TIME London Correspondent Erik Amfitheatrof.

"But it's clear you can't do that unless you stay in the black." The press has been moving toward works of wider appeal, four-color paperback covers and a broad range of authors whose books may support the scholarly works. Editors no longer consider it beneath their dignity to offer advances and outbid other publishers. The press at Oxford eventually may even break a 500-year taboo and publish the novel of a living author.

But there is one tradition that the press's guardians vow not to break: that of their commitment to quality. "Our greatest asset is our reputation," says Sales Manager George Depotex. Without that, the whole enterprise might well be vulnerable to floccinaucinihilipilification.

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