Letters, Telegrams, Steam, and Speed

Letters, Telegrams, Steam, and Speed

Oxford was finally linked to the rail network in June 1844. Within a decade or so the railway had become part of the way in which Oxford University Press at all levels conducted its business and its pleasure. One such pleasure was a wayzgoose.  Originally a wayzgoose...
OUP Faces up to the Nazis

OUP Faces up to the Nazis

  Ever since the end of the First World War OUP had been keen to re-establish some sort of presence in the German book trade. Germany had been a significant market for its academic books in the nineteenth century, and a number of German scholars had edited Greek...
Damp Paper and Difficult Conditions

Damp Paper and Difficult Conditions

Oxford University was a large mass-producer of books by the 1820s. Despite this, it was still occupying a very elegant but modest-sized neo-classical building in the centre of Oxford designed for it in 1713 by Nicholas Hawksmoor. By the mid-1820s this building was...
‘Paul Pry’ at midnight

‘Paul Pry’ at midnight

Until the 1840s time in Oxford, and therefore at the University Press, was five minutes behind that of London. With no uniform national time until the coming of the railways and the telegraph, the sealed clocks carried by mail coaches would have to be adjusted to...