Volume 25, Number 9 · June 1, 1978
Five Hundred Years of the King's English
By Denis Donoghue
The Oxford University Press and the Spread of Learning: An Illustrated History
by Nicolas Barker
Oxford University Press, 332 pp., $25.00
A History of the Oxford University Press Volume I: To the Year 1780
by Harry Carter
Oxford University Press, 640 pp., $48.00
The Oxford University Press: An Informal History
by Peter Sutcliffe
Oxford University Press, 303 pp., $14.95
Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary
by K.M. Elisabeth Murray
Yale University Press, 386 pp., $15.00
The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800
by Lucien Febvre, by Henri-Jean Martin, translated by David Gerard
Schocken Books, 378 pp., $25.00
Sir Herbert Grierson's edition of Donne's poems, published by the Clarendon Press in 1912, was sent to Rupert Brooke for review. Musing upon the book as an indisputably fine thing, Brooke listed other grand institutions, including 'Charing Cross Bridge by night, the dancing of Miss Ethel Levey, the Lucretian hexameter, the beer at an inn in Royston,…the sausages at another inn above Princes Risborough, and the Clarendon Press editions of the English poets.' And among these he made a temporal discrimination. 'The beer and the sausages will change,' he admitted, 'and Miss Levey one day will die, and Charing Cross Bridge will fall; so the Clarendon Press books will be the only thing our evil generation may show to the cursory eyes of posterity, to prove it was not wholly bad.' Peter Sutcliffe has quoted this encomium in his informal history of Oxford University Press, partly for its intrinsic interest, and partly to illustrate his assertion that by 1914 OUP had established itself 'as a national institution with a responsibility to survive in the interest of civilization as a whole.'
Review, 3268 words
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