Books
Very Short Introductions – the latest in a very long list Tom Wheare celebrates the continuing contribution of the Oxford University Press to the family or school library.
In 1901, a go-ahead young publisher, Grant Richards, launched a series of out of copyright re-prints to which he gave the title World’s Classics. Although these books were readily available under other imprints, the new collection made a point of high production values and rapidly became immensely successful. Unfortunately, this caused Richards to over-extend his business which became bankrupt in 1905. The series was acquired by the Oxford University Press and the ‘pocket-sized hardbacks’, as they were described, became the foundation of many home libraries. The introductions were written by established authorities, some of whom featured elsewhere in the collection, and there were attractive dust-jackets, although in our house at least, these often seemed to go missing, revealing the Oxford blue binding, inside which they still remain in perfect
condition. In 1998 the series was relaunched in paperback as Oxford World’s Classics, now the regular format, although some titles are still published in the ‘traditional’ hardback form. Collecting these books genuinely does provide a library of great literature, in which one can cherry-pick or explore the lesser known works of the more prolific authors. In 1940, OUP also acquired the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, when the offices of the publishers, Thornton Butterworth, were destroyed in the Blitz. This added non-fiction to what was, effectively, the OUP’s outreach programme, and both series were immensely popular during the war. Whilst Trollope and Jane Austen evoked essential and historic decencies, the popularity of the HUL may be seen as part of the stream of enlightened thinking that produced the
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