University of Chicago Press - History

History

The University of Chicago Press was founded in 1891, making it one of the oldest continuously operating university presses in the United States. Its first published book was Robert F. Harper's Assyrian and Babylonian Letters Belonging to the Kouyunjik Collections of the British Museum. The book sold five copies during its first two years, but by 1900, the University of Chicago Press had published 127 books and pamphlets and 11 scholarly journals, including the current American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Infectious Diseases, and Journal of Near Eastern Studies.

For its first three years, the Press was an entity discrete from the University; it was operated by the Boston publishing house D. C. Heath in conjunction with the Chicago printer R. R. Donnelley. This arrangement proved unworkable, however, and in 1894 the University officially assumed responsibility for the Press.

In 1902, as part of the University, the Press started working on 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 was a radical reorganization of the Press. This allowed the Press, by 1905, to begin publishing books by scholars not of the University of Chicago. A copy-editing 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.

By 1931, the Press was an established, leading academic publisher. Leading books of that era include Dr. Edgar J. Goodspeed's The New Testament: An American Translation (the Press's first nationally successful title) and its successor, Goodspeed 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.

In 1956, the Press first published paperback-bound books under its imprint. Of the Press's best-known books, most date from the 1950s, including translations of the Complete Greek Tragedies and Richmond 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 worldwide.

In 1966, Morris Philipson began his thirty-four-year tenure as director of the University of Chicago Press. He committed time and resources to lengthening the backlist, becoming known for assuming ambitious scholarly projects, among the largest of which was The Lisle Letters — a vast collection of 16th-century correspondence by Arthur Plantagenet, 1st Viscount Lisle, a wealth of information about every aspect of sixteenth-century life.

As the Press's scholarly volume expanded, the Press also advanced as a trade publisher, when both of Norman Maclean's books — A River Runs Through It and Young Men and Fire— were ranked in the national best-seller list in 1992, and Robert Redford filmed A River Runs Through It.

In 1982, Philipson was the first director of an academic press to win the Publisher Citation, one of PEN's most prestigious awards. Shortly before he retired in June 2000, Philipson received the Association of American Publishers' Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing, awarded to the person whose "creativity and leadership have left a lasting mark on American publishing."