THE LATEST AGE

In spite of the statement of the Syndics quoted at the end of the preceding chapter, the University Commissioners of 1850-52 reported their opinion that

it is only by associating printers or publishers in some species of co-partnership with the University, or by leasing the Press to them, that any considerable return can hereafter be expected from the capital which has been invested in it ... we are satisfied that no Syndicate, however active and well chosen, can replace the intelligent and vigilant superintendence of those whose fortune in life is dependent upon its success.

Accordingly, on the resignation of Parker, the Syndicate recommended that the university should enter into partnership with "Mr George Seeley of Fleet Street, London, Bookseller, and Mr Charles John Clay, M.A. of Trinity College and of Bread Street Hill, London, Printer," and the grace for the deed of partnership was passed on 3 July, 1854.

The control of the printing thus came into the hands of Mr Clay, whilst Mr Seeley received the sole agency for the sale of Cambridge bibles and prayer-books; Mr Seeley, however, retired two years later and Mr Clay entered into a fresh agreement with the university.

The period of Mr Clay's management was one of great expansion. At the end of his first ten years of office it was estimated that the Press produced about four or five times as much as when he first undertook the management; in 1876, and again in 1886, the Syndics reported to the Senate that the business had attained a considerable magnitude and that large additions had been made to the machinery and plant.

Increase of business naturally demanded increased accommodation and in 1863 a foundry was built upon the site of some old cottages in Black Lion Yard. Eight years later new machine-rooms and warehouses were built on the site of Diamond Court, leading out of Silver Street, and a still larger addition was made in 1877-78, when a three-storied building was erected in the south-west corner of the quadrangle. The most recent additions are the extensions of the warehouse and machine-room on the Silver Street side and the red brick building (containing the syndicate room and secretarial offices), which forms the south side of the quadrangle[138].

In 1882 Mr John Clay, son of Mr C. J. Clay, was admitted into the partnership with the university and from 1886 to 1904 Mr C. F. Clay was also associated with it. Mr John Clay became university printer on his father's retirement in 1895 and held the office until his death in 1916, when the partnership was dissolved and the present printer, Mr J. B. Peace, Fellow of Emmanuel College, was appointed. From 1917 to 1919 the Syndics also employed the services of Mr Bruce Rogers, whose distinguished work as a printer is well known on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the best known figures in the Press in the later half of the nineteenth century was that of Alfred Mason. His remarkable personality dominated the counting-house for a long period and when he died in 1919 he had been for 65 years in the service of the Press.

The present buildings of the Press include machine-rooms, containing large quad royal and quad demy perfectors, revolution presses, and single cylinder machines; a foundry comprising a stereotyping department, an electro-moulding room, an electro-battery room, and two finishing rooms; type storerooms, composing-rooms, and monotype-rooms; an art department for lithographic, half-tone, and other process work; and the warehouse, where the finished sheets are stored ready to be sent away for binding. Every month an average of 40 tons of printed matter leaves the Press to be delivered to London binders.

Printing is done in a wide variety of languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Pali, Coptic, Sanskrit, Hausa, Syriac and Amharic, and the type catalogue makes a volume of about 200 pages.

Perhaps the greatest fame of the Cambridge Press rests upon its mathematical typography. To glance at a page, say, of Principia Mathematica is to realise a little—but only a little—of the minute care and skill required of the compositor, the press-reader, and the machine-minder in the production of such a book. It may be permissible here, perhaps, to quote one recent tribute from the preface to Professor E. W. Brown's Tables of the Motion of the Moon, printed in 1918 for the Yale University Press:

The reading of the proof has been almost entirely directed to the detection of errors in the manuscript. That this has been possible is due to the remarkable record of the Cambridge University Press which in setting up over five hundred quarto pages of numerical tables has allowed less than a dozen printer's errors to pass its proof-readers and has, in addition, frequently queried our own mistakes. Few sheets have required a second proof and in the actual use of the Tables, as finally printed, for the calculation of the ephemeris for two years, no error of any kind has been detected.

On the retirement of Mr George Seeley in 1856, Messrs Hamilton, Adams & Co., of Paternoster Row, were appointed as agents for the Syndics' books[139]. This arrangement, however, does not seem to have been satisfactory, as the name of a new agent—George Cox—appears in the following year; a further change was made in 1862 when the firm of Rivingtons became agents for Cambridge books; finally, when this agreement came to an end, ten years later, the Syndics reported to the Senate that "acting on the advice of Mr Clay" they had decided "not to appoint other Agents, but to conduct their London business in an office of their own, under the superintendence of a paid Manager" and that they had agreed "to take a Lease of convenient premises in Paternoster Row."

The beginning of the Syndics' career as London publishers—in the strict sense of the term—must therefore be assigned to the year 1872. At that time the number of books published by the Syndics—apart from bibles and prayer-books—was very small. Among them, however, may be noted the first volume of Mullinger's The University of Cambridge, published in 1873, the first instalment of a monumental work which remained uncompleted at the author's death in 1917.

In 1874 an important step was taken, the Syndics deciding to publish a series of editions of Greek, Latin, French, and German authors designed for use in schools and especially for candidates for the Local Examinations. This was the beginning of the Pitt Press Series, which now includes over 300 volumes, and such editions as Sidgwick's Virgil and Mr Verity's Shakespeare—to name but two out of many—have become familiar to many generations of schoolboys.

The Syndics' catalogue for 1875 (a pamphlet of 16 tiny pages) reflects the beginnings of schoolbook publishing: it opens with some nine volumes in the Pitt Press Series; then follow Scrivener's Paragraph Bible, Scholefield's Greek Testament and several theological works including Isaac Barrow's Works in nine volumes; there are five editions of Greek and Latin authors, among them being Paley and Sandys's Private Orations of Demosthenes and Heitland's Cicero pro Murena; mathematics and physics claim nine books, including Kelvin and Tait's Elements of Natural Philosophy; history is represented by Mullinger's first volume, already referred to, and Mayor's edition of Baker's History of St John's College; of law books there are three, including Whewell's edition of Grotius de Iure Belli ac Pacis; and the list ends with a few catalogues and university examination papers.

In 1877 the publication of another important series was begun—The Cambridge Bible for Schools. The general editor was Dr J. J. S. Perowne, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, and the first volume to appear was Maclear's St Mark.

Originally designed for school use, the series soon attained a wider public. It was begun before the publication of the Revised Version and at the very time when the controversy was raging in Scotland which resulted in the suspension of Robertson Smith from his professorship at Aberdeen; when the series was finally completed by Sir George Adam Smith's Deuteronomy in 1918, many of the older volumes had already been replaced or revised. On the death of Bishop Perowne in 1904 The Times referred to the series as one which had "done more to spread accurate Biblical knowledge among English-speaking people than any book except the Revised Version."

The agreements between the university presses and the two companies of revisers for the publication of the Revised Version had been completed, "after much careful consideration as well as protracted negotiation," in 1873.

Three years earlier the New Testament company had held the first of its 407 meetings in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. The company included the most distinguished theologians of the time—Hort, Westcott, Lightfoot, Ellicott, Scrivener, W. F. Moulton—and at first an average of only seventeen verses was revised in the daily session. Later, however, progress became a little more rapid and the revision was completed on 11 November, 1880. The Revised New Testament was published jointly by the university presses in 1881 and the Old Testament three years later. The secretary of the Old Testament company was W. Aldis Wright, for more than 30 years a Syndic of the Cambridge Press.

By 1890 the catalogue of the Syndics' publications had grown considerably, not only by additions to the Pitt Press and other Series, but by the publication of larger works on literary and scientific subjects, such as Robertson Smith's Kinship and Marriage in early Arabia, Willis and Clark's Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, Maitland's edition of Bracton's Note Book, and Jebb's Sophocles.

Cayley's Collected Mathematical Papers, in thirteen volumes, were published between 1889 and 1897, and have since been followed by similar collections of the mathematical and scientific work of Kelvin, Rayleigh, Reynolds, Stokes, Sylvester, Tait, and other scholars. Meanwhile, larger publishing premises were found to be necessary, and in 1884 the London office was moved to Ave Maria Lane; with the growth of business these premises similarly became inadequate and the lease of the present offices in Fetter Lane was bought by the university in 1904.

One of the most important of the Syndics' undertakings towards the end of the last century was The Cambridge Modern History. Lord Acton had been elected Regius Professor of Modern History in 1895 and early in 1896 the Syndics approached him with a view to the compilation of a great English universal history. In his report of 15 July, 1896 Lord Acton wrote:

Universal history is not the sum of all particular histories, and ought to be contemplated, first, in its distinctive essence, as Renaissance, Reformation, Religious Wars, Absolute Monarchy, Revolution, etc. The several countries may or may not contribute to feed the main stream, and the distribution of matter must be made accordingly. The history of nations that are off the line must not suffer; it must be told as accurately as if the whole was divided into annals....

and later in a more detailed report:

It will be necessary to prescribe exact limits and conditions, and to explain clearly what we desire to obtain, and to avoid. We shall avoid the needless utterance of opinion, and the service of a cause. Contributors will understand that we are established not under the meridian of Greenwich, but in longitude 30 West; that our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, Germans and Dutch alike.... Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of conventional history and show the point we have reached on the road from the one to the other.... If History is often called the teacher and the guide that regulates public life, which, to individuals as to societies, is as important as private, this is the time and the place to prove the title....

The essential elements of the plan I propose for consideration are these:

Division of subjects among many specially qualified writers.

Highest pitch of knowledge without the display.

Distinction between the organic unity of general history and the sum of national histories, as the principle for selecting and distributing matter.

Proportion between historic thought and historic fact.

Chart and compass for the coming century.

Lord Acton, however, did not live to carry out the work and the editorship was entrusted to Sir A. W. Ward, Sir G. W. Prothero, and Sir Stanley Leathes.

The first of the volumes of text appeared in 1902 and the whole work was completed by a general index published in 1912.

This plan of co-operative history has been adopted by the Syndics in several other branches of learning: The Cambridge History of English Literature was completed under the editorship of Sir A. W. Ward and Mr A. R. Waller in 1916, and other works in progress are The Cambridge Medieval History, The Cambridge History of India, The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, and The Cambridge Ancient History.

Another important undertaking was the publication of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1911.

Short of summarising the forty-five main subject-headings of the current catalogue, it would be difficult—as well as invidious—to enter into further detail concerning the modern publications of the Cambridge University Press. It may suffice to note that in the years immediately preceding the war the average annual output of new books, exclusive of journals, was 150. This figure excludes, of course, the various editions of Cambridge bibles and prayer-books: at the present time there are, apart from the various styles of binding, 26 different editions of the Authorised, and 19 of the Revised Version; 19 editions of the English, and 6 of the Scottish prayer-book; of the latter, as of the new Canadian prayer-book, the Syndics are the sole publishers.

During the war both the printing and publishing businesses suffered from shortage of personnel, of metal, and of paper. Two hundred and fifty-two servants of the Syndics joined His Majesty's forces and of these forty-one were killed, or died, on service.

In conclusion, it may be remarked that the method of the government of the Press by a body of Syndics appointed by the Senate of the university has, with certain important modifications, persisted since 1698.

The constitution of the Syndicate has been more than once revised—notably in 1782 and 1855—and the length of a Syndic's tenure of office varied from time to time. The present body consists of the Vice-Chancellor (ex officio) and fourteen Syndics; the term of appointment is seven years and two Syndics retire each year. The first permanent secretary, Mr R. T. Wright, formerly Fellow of Christ's College, was appointed in 1892; on his retirement in 1911 he was succeeded by the present secretary, Mr A. R. Waller, of Peterhouse.

The Syndics employ a staff of about 280 in Cambridge and of 110, under the management of Mr C. F. Clay, at their publishing office in Fetter Lane; their current catalogue contains the titles of some 2500 books bearing the imprimatur of the university.

Such, in brief summary, is the measure of the development of Cambridge printing since John Siberch set up his press at the sign of the Arma Regia in 1521.