page_title: University of Chicago Press
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: University of Chicago Press / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Interior of Harper Memorial Library at University of Chicago.
context_page_description: The University of Chicago Press is the largest and one of the oldest university presses in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, numerous academic journals, and advanced monographs in the academic fields.
  One of its quasi-independent projects is the BiblioVault, a digital repository for scholarly books.
  The Press building is located just south of the Midway Plaisance on the University of Chicago campus.
context_section_description: The University of Chicago Press was founded in 1890, 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 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 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 (including the Phoenix Books series) 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 34-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 16th-century life.
  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 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."
  Paula Barker Duffy served as director of the Press from 2000 to 2007. Under her administration, the Press expanded its distribution operations and created the Chicago Digital Distribution Center and BiblioVault. Editorial depth in reference and regional books increased with titles such as The Encyclopedia of Chicago, Timothy J. Gilfoyle's Millennium Park, and new editions of The Chicago Manual of Style, the Turabian Manual, and The University of Chicago Spanish Dictionar
caption: University of Chicago, Harper Library
exif: {"Image Model": "NIKON D7000", "Image XResolution": "240", "Image YResolution": "240", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.6 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2012:02:22 07:48:23", "Image Artist": "Rick Seidel", "Image Copyright": "2012", "Image ExifOffset": "228", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "624", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "20969", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/5", "EXIF FNumber": "11", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2012:02:20 09:35:21", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2012:02:20 09:35:21", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "290241/125000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "6918863/1000000", "EXIF FocalLength": "10", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "80", "EXIF BodySerialNumber": "3060548", "EXIF LensSpecification": "[10, 20, 7/2, 7/2]", "EXIF LensModel": "10.0-20.0 mm f/3.5"}