University of Chicago Press

The University of Chicago Press is the

One of its quasi-independent projects is the BiblioVault, a digital repository for scholarly books.

History

The University of Chicago Press was founded in 1890, making it one of the oldest continuously operating university presses in the United States.^[5][6] 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 Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and American Journal of Sociology.

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 manuscript 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

In 1956, the press first published paperback-bound books (including the Phoenix Books series)^[7] 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,

As the press's scholarly volume expanded, the press also advanced as a trade publisher. In 1992, Norman Maclean's books A River Runs Through It and Young Men and Fire were national best sellers, and A River Runs Through It was made into a film directed by and starring Robert Redford.

In 1982, Philipson was the first director of an academic press to win the Publisher Citation, one of

In 2014, the press received The International Academic and Professional Publisher Award for excellence at the London Book Fair.^[8]

Current status

Garrett P. Kiely became the 15th director of the University of Chicago Press on September 1, 2007. He heads one of academic publishing's largest operations, employing more than 300 people across three divisions—books, journals, and distribution—and publishing 81 journal titles and approximately 280 new books and 70 paperback reprints each year.

The press publishes over 50 new trade titles per year, across many subject areas. It also publishes regional titles, such as