Anonymous. Printing and Publishing at Oxford...: Catalogue of an Exhibition. (1978)

     Anonymous. Printing and Publishing at Oxford...: Catalogue of an Exhibition. (1978) Robert Shackleton, Bodley’s Librarian, in his introduction thanks Paul Morgan for preparing the exhibition. I think Morgan also wrote the catalogue. I rediscovered this book while culling, and started to read it. Fascinating. I discovered I could read most of the Latin titles, not surprising if one considers that they're about academic subjects. The exhibits illustrate that despite occasional doldrums and lapses, the Oxford University Press has been a supplier of scholarly books. Its great value for me has been its “complete works” collections of poems, edited with annotations, which I bought when I was at U of A and later, and all of which I have read at least in part.
     The summary history of the Press was what drew me in. It took a century or more for the University authorities to realise what they had and what they could do with it. It took some time for the Press to be taken into ownership, for example; the first printers were under contract to the University, even when they were given space in the Sheldonian Theatre to set up the presses. It’s also clear that printing was tightly controlled; the governments of the day understood as well as ours do that uncontrolled information could be destabilising. I was surprised at the cost of paper, and compositors didn’t come cheap either. Fonts (“founts”) were expensive, too, most of them made on the Continent in the first century or so. The University commissioned the making of special fonts for Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, and so on, and for a long time Oxford was the only press capable of printing texts in these alphabets. Making fonts involved cutting punches in steel, using these to make dies, and then casting the letters in type metal. All by hand, no CAD/CAM. Yet despite its awkwardness and costs, printing was clearly a major advance in information technology, and is still not superseded. Electronics make the dissemination of information cheaper than ever, but only hard copy, print or handwriting on paper, will be certainly readable in the future. *** (2008)
     Disclosure: Paul Morgan was my uncle.