Parent company | University of Chicago |
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Founded | 1891 |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | Chicago |
Publication types | Books, academic journals |
Official website | press |
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 a wide array of 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.
The University of Chicago Press was founded in 1891, 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.