Education: Oxford's Ancient Quality Act

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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.