A History of Cambridge University Press. Vol. III: New Worlds for Learning, 1873-1973 (review)

This is the third and final volume of a set that runs in all to over 1,500 pages. It is in itself a major achievement. Dr McKitterick's aim, to set the history of the CUP in a broader context of academic publishing and indeed general economic and cultural history, has again been achieved, in this period with a new tranche of evidence gathered from oral discussion with many of the key figures in the management of the business. It may take a while — but surely not too long — for lessons learnt from this major venture to find their way into the arterial system of modern publishing history, but they will assuredly have to be taken fully into account.

There is much here that takes the story of the Press's major publications well beyond what has been generally known about them. Willis and Clark's Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, Doughty's Arabia Deserta, or the 1911 (eleventh) edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (which gets a whole chapter to itself after decades of embarrassed neglect) are good examples. So too are the Cambridge Modern History and the various other comparable series it has spawned, and the Pitt Press textbooks that take us some way into the still under-explored territory of schoolbook provision. And in the background there is always the Authorized Version, necessarily prominent in the history of the privileged presses. It is seen here in darker hues than usual, especially at the time of the birth of the Revised Version, a project less successful than anticipated, all in a sensitive market that demanded vigilance. All such matters, and many more, are freshly explored in a broad context and at various levels: Syndicate minutes and accounts, printing-house records, and the limited amount of surviving correspondence, backed by the oral record from the mid-twentieth century.

McKitterick's chapters on the printing side, which in this period see in the introduction of Monotype and almost see out the entire letterpress department, could (though they do not deserve it) be taken separately. Bruce Rogers, Stanley Morison, and John Dreyfus, with Walter Lewis (less well known and here very well presented) are the heroes, and their work is handled with knowledge and taste. But there is also a strong sense of the machine rooms and their staff, sufficient to make clear the ways in which a craftsmanly conservatism could never wholly meet the demands (not least on costings) of the publishers. And the publication side, with personalities almost as strong, is equally well discussed, not least in its occasional failings (such as S. C. Roberts's misplaced attachment to the Quiller-Couch belletristic tradition, at a time when 'Cambridge English' was establishing itself so firmly with other, London, publishers). Other developments of the period, such as the Press's increasing involvement in learned journal publication, are touched on, but not in the depth they perhaps deserve, and there is scope for more detailed investigation elsewhere.

The final chapters, covering the thirty years from the end of the Second World War, are in many ways the most interesting. A 'crisis' was developing, almost it seems unbeknownst to the two branches of the upper management. The printing business, still heavily and happily committed to letterpress, was producing some of its finest work, to international acclaim. There were serious problems internally, even if the world, knowing the (temporary) success of the New English Bible, had a vague impression that the bible business kept the Press buoyantly afloat. The upper echelons of management were amiably entrenched on one or the other side, and their supervisory Syndicate was learned in scholarship but unskilled in large-scale finance. Increasingly throughout the 1960s, CUP was dependent on its million-pound bank loan, and tensions had begun to show.

In 1972 the Syndicate got itself a new chairman, the organic chemist Lord Todd, Master...