SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

What have the following in common: the book on Beethoven which the promenaders presented to Colin Davis last Saturday, the five-volume history of the Royal Navy in World Wart by the Californian professor who was profiled in a colour supplement on Sunday, and the runaway best-selling hardback book of this year (the New English Bible)? The answer is that they are all, along with The Theory of Creep and Creep Rup- ture, a Bibliography of Bibliographers of the South Pacific and Baseball—The Early Years, among the 18,000 items listed in the current catalogue of what must be the most remarkable publishing house in the world, the Oxford University Press.

Until I was recently asked to look into it by an enterprising American magazine, I had no idea that, in terms of titles published an- nually, the OUP is not only (second to the Stationery Office) the largest publisher in this country, but almost certainly the largest non-state publishing organisation anywhere. It has branches in five continents and twenty-one countries, an annual turnover of more than f 1 6 million, its own paper mill (established in 1672), its music department alone is probably the largest music publisher in Britain. its computerised distribution cen- tre at Neasden is the most up-to-date in the world.

And yet the whole of this vast in- ternational business, which has grown from the loan of £100 to an Oxford bookseller in the year Shakespeare came of age, is still wholly owned by the University, and run by a Board of Delegates, including Sir Maurice Bowra, Helen Gardiner, the Regius Pro- fessor of Divinity and the Camden Professor of Ancient History, for no reward other than the right to free books from the current list.

Two pillars

One confusion I was glad to have cleared up was the relationship between the various parts of the out.. I had always assumed that `the Publisher', men such as Sir Humphrey Milford and Geoffrey Cumberlege, whose names appear at the front of so many our books, ran the whole show. In fact the Publisher, currently Mr John Brown, whose office is an elegant eighteenth century bishop's mansion in Mayfair, is very im- portant—but he only runs the London branch of the Press, which publishes four fifths of the books, distributes, and oversees all the foreign branches except that in New York.

The real chief executive of the OUP is the Secretary to the Delegates, for the past six- teen years Mr Colin Roberts, a papyrologist from St John's, whose first published work thirty-six years ago was his discovery of our earliest datable fragment of the New Testa- ment. He presides over the whole empire (including the mostly learned books published in Oxford under the imprint of 'the Claren- don Press') from its headquarters in Walton Street—an 1830 peeling-stone replica of a college, with quadrangle, goldfish pond and its two sides, the 'Learned' and `Bible' sides, reflecting the two pillars on which the outi's prosperity was founded.

Not the least striking aspect of the OUP to an outsider is the obviously enormous loyalty and pride of all its staff—right down

to the pensioner who showed me round the printing works, and recalled how in the year he joined the Press he heard the news of the relief of Mafeking from a church pulpit, to loud cheers from the congregation.

No neophiliacs

In an undistinguished terrace house in South Oxford, finishing touches are currently being put to the two-volume supplement to the great Oxford Dictionary, due to be published in 1972. and containing all the new words which have established themselves in the English language since 1928. when the last volume of the oEu was published. To this ad- dress for the past fifteen years there has been a constant flow of postcard references to new words, culled from newspapers, scientific journals, 'established' authors (such as `Lawrence, Hemingway and Faulkner, but not Finnegan Wake') and the SPECTATOR, by a worldwide variety of correspondents, the most assiduous of whom has been Miss Marghanita Laski.

Sources of most of the novelties, such as 'bikini' and `polyvinylchloride', are obvious, although four-letter words will 'probably' be included for the first time for other reasons. I checked the many references to the word `Pseud', which appeared in almost every other line of the Shrewsbury school maga- zine between 1954 and 1956, but none were earlier than 1962. 'Neophiliac' will not be included.

Crowd scene

One might have thought that a splendid hare had been unleashed through the cor- respondence columns of the Times by the claim of a correspondent last week that the 250,000 who gathered on the Isle of Wight recently represented the largest crowd in history gathered for `purposes other than the eventual slaughter of their fellow creatures'.

I looked forward, for instance, to the reply charging that the prize should surely go to the crowds of up to half a million faithful who had gathered for Papal occasions in front of St Peter's, only to see it knocked down by the caveat that they had not 'en- camped for several days'. The two million employed by Semiramis to rebuild Babylon would I suppose be discounted on the grounds of unreliable statistics, as would the gathering of the entire children of Israel for the opening of Solomon's temple (although at least the 50.000 musicians assembled for that occasion might have been beyond even the budget of Fiery Creations).

A claim might have been put in for the million-odd people who assembled (and in many cases camped) in the streets of London for the Coronation—although at last some shrewd fellow would inevitably have con- sulted the Guinness Book of Records to see that no less than 4,500,000 Hindus gathered for a holy festival in Uttar Pradesh in 1954. And then finally someone might have rounded off the correspondence by pointing out that since it has often enough been stated that the Isle of Wight could still ac- commodate the entire population of the world, a mere quarter of a million did not represent much of a start, considering the 3,599,750.000 people who were not there.