Abstract
When considering any printing or publishing firm, however august, one should never forget to ask the embarrassing questions: how does it make its money, and how then is its money spent? For Oxford University Press in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the engine that made the profits was the printing of Bibles, for which it had gained a number of privileges in the 1580s and 1630s. However, for all sorts of technical and political reasons, the Press wasn’t inclined to exercise its profitable privilege immediately or directly. Instead it frequently sold its rights to the Stationers’ Company in London. From 1637 the university commonly received £200 per annum from the Stationers for its ‘forebearance’ from publishing Bibles, Lily’s Grammar and other profitable lines.
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Selected bibliography
Briggs, Asa (2008) A History of Longmans. London: British Library.
Carter, Harry (1975) A History of the Oxford University Press. Volume I: To the Year 1780. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
James, Elizabeth (ed.) (2002) Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Madan, Falconer 1895, 1912, 1931) Oxford Books: A Bibliography of Printed Works Relating to the University and City of Oxford or Printed or Published There, Volumes I–III. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
Sutcliffe, Peter (1978) The Oxford University Press: An Informal History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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© 2011 Simon Eliot
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Eliot, S. (2011). ‘To Undertake Such Works as They Find to Be Wanted’: The Early Years of the Clarendon Press Series. In: Spiers, J. (eds) The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume One. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299368_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299368_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32920-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29936-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)