University of Chicago Press
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the U.S. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of texts covering academic fields as diverse as Drama, Literary Criticism, Economics, Anthropology, Astrophysics, and Philosophy.
One of its quasi-independent projects is the BiblioVault, a digital repository for scholarly books.
It also publishes journals like American Journal of Sociology.
The press building is located just south of the Midway Plaisance on the UC campus, near an enormous statue of Saint Wenceslaus on horseback, sculpted by Albin Polasek (1879-1965) and dedicated as a memorial to Thomas Masaryk (1850-1937), the first president of Czechoslovakia.
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[edit] History
The University of Chicago Press was founded in 1891, making it one of the oldest continuously-operating university presses in the United States. The first book to bear Chicago's imprint was Robert F. Harper's Assyrian and Babylonian Letters Belonging to the Kouyunjik Collections of the British Museum. It sold five copies during its first two years in print, but by 1900, the Press had published 127 books and pamphlets and eleven scholarly journals, including the still-thriving American Journal of Sociology, the Astrophysical Journal, and the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.
For its first three years the Press was an entity entirely separate from the University; it was operated by the Boston publishing house of D.C. Heath in conjunction with the Chicago printer R. R. Donnelley. This arrangement proved unworkable however, and in 1894 the University officially took responsibility for the Press.
In 1902 under the University's wing, work commenced on one of the earliest and most ambitious publishing programs in the scholarly world: the Decennial Publications. Composed of articles and monographs by scholars and administrators on the state of the university and its faculty's research, the Decennial Publications marked a radical reorganization of the Press and its staff and resources allowing the Press, by 1905, to begin to publish books by scholars outside the University of Chicago. But most notably during this period a copyediting and proofreading department was added to the existing staff of printers and typesetters, leading, in 1906, to the first edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. The Manual has been continuously in print since 1906.
By 1931, the Press had established itself both economically and academically as one of the nation's premier academic publishers. Leading books of this era were: Dr. Edgar J. Goodspeed's The New Testament: An American Translation (perhaps the first nationally successful Press title) and its successor, Goodspeed's and J. M. Povis Smith's The Complete Bible: An American Translation; Sir William Alexander Craigie's A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, published in four volumes in 1943; John Manly and Edith Rickert's The Canterbury Tales, published in 1940; and Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.
By 1951, the books and journals divisions of the Press were separated from the printing operation, leaving those divisions accountable to the University's academic officers and the printing department reporting to the University's business officers. The Press was now free to concentrate solely on publishing, but it was also free from the income that the printing department had generated. The University compensated the Press for this loss of income via a subsidy until 1955.
In 1956 the first paperbacks were issued under the Press's imprint. A number of the Press's best-known and bestselling books also date from the 1950s, including translations of the Complete Greek Tragedies and Richard Lattimore's The Iliad of Homer. That decade also saw the first edition of A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature which has since been used by students of Biblical Greek around the world.
In 1966, Morris Philipson began his tenure as director of the Press, a position he occupied for 33 years. Philipson committed time and resources to building the backlist of the Press. Philipson became known for taking on ambitious scholarly projects, among the largest of which was The Lisle Letters. While the scholarly output of the Press expanded, the Press also made significant strides as a trade publisher when both of Norman Maclean's books-A River Runs Through It and Young Men and Fire-made the national best-seller list in 1992 and Robert Redford made a movie of A River Runs Through It. The Press also committed to publishing regional titles, a move cemented by the success of 1999's One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko, a collection of columns by the legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune newspaperman.
In 1982, Philipson became the first director of an academic press to win one of PEN's most prestigious awards, the Publisher Citation.Shortly before he retired in June 2000, Philipson was awarded the Association of American Publishers' Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing, an award given to a person whose "creativity and leadership have left a lasting mark on American publishing."
[edit] Current Status
Paula Barker Duffy became the fourteenth director of the University of Chicago Press on August 1, 2000. She currently heads one of academic publishing's largest operations employing 300 people across its three divisions of books, journals, and distribution and publishing approximately 180 new books and 70 paperback reprints a year. The University of Chicago Press currently maintains three operating divisions-Books, Journals, and Distribution Services.
[edit] Books Division
The Books Division of the University of Chicago Press has been publishing books for scholars, students, and general readers since 1892 and has published over 11,000 books since its founding. The Books Division has more than five thousand books in print at the present time, including such well-known works as The Chicago Manual of Style; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn; A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean; and The Road to Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek.
[edit] Journals Division
The Journals Division publishes forty-three journals and five annuals in a wide range of academic disciplines, including the social sciences, the humanities, education, the biological and medical sciences, and the physical sciences. The American Journal of Sociology, founded in 1895, is the oldest academic journal devoted to sociology, while History of Religions was the first academic journal devoted exclusively to comparative religious history. The Journals Division launched electronic publishing efforts in 1995 and by 2004 all the journals published by the University of Chicago Press became available online.
[edit] Chicago Distribution Services
The Distribution Services Division provides the University of Chicago Press's warehousing, customer service, and related services. The Chicago Distribution Center began providing distribution services in 1991, when the University of Tennessee Press became its first client. Currently the CDC serves forty-four publishers. The CDC coordinates with the Press's Books Division to provide sales representation and/or marketing services to about half of its client presses.
In 2001, with development funding, the CDDC (Chicago Digital Distribution Center) began to offer digital printing services and BiblioVault digital repository services to book publishers.
