Oxford University Press is the largest scholarly press in the world,
with a network of branches around the globe, from Australia and New Zealand to South Africa, India, Japan, and of course the United States.
We are also one of the oldest presses in the world, dating back more than five centuries, to 1478, when Theodoric Rood set up the first printing press at Oxford, only a few decades after Gutenberg printed his famous Bible.
Oxford took root in America in 1896, renting offices at 91 Fifth Avenue, at first to publish our prestigious line of Bibles (Abraham Lincoln had sworn his second Oath of Office on a Oxford Bible—the same Bible that Barack Obama swore the Oath on). In 1926, we began publishing nonfiction trade books, and the very first one—Harvey Cushing's two-volume biography of William Osler—won the Pulitzer Prize. We have since won twelve more Pulitzers (see our list of Major Awards).
Indeed, since 1969, when we won Pulitzers for both Biography and History, we've won 18 major book awards, averaging out to about an award every other year, a pace that few other publishers can match.
Our success springs from the ideals that inform all of our publishing,
from the most scholarly and specialized to the most accessible, namely the desire to disseminate the finest available scholarship, both in the United States and around the world. We do this in as broad a manner as possible, publishing engaging books for young adults, authoritative monographs for academics and professionals, Bibles for a wide range of denominations, sheet music for musicians and choral groups, guides for people learning English as a second language, English and bilingual dictionaries, and much more. We see ourselves as playing a key role in the advancement of knowledge. In every book we publish, on every piece of letterhead, we state our ultimate goal: to further Oxford University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. It is a five-hundred-year-old legacy of superb publishing, a tradition that we are honored to be a part of and dedicated to continuing far into the future.
In America, we publish approximately 500 titles each year, of which 250 are scholarly research monographs, and we import close to 800 titles from our UK and branch offices. In addition, we have some 3,300 scholarly books in print and stock another 8,700 imports. All publications are first vetted by OUP's Delegates, who are leading scholars at the top American universities or the leading universities in the UK.
