History of University of Chicago Press

The University of Chicago Press is the one of the oldest operating in the United States, it was started in 1891. Its first book was Robert F. Harper's Assyrian and Babylonian Letters Belonging to the Kouyunjik Collections of the British Museum. In 1900, the Press had published 127 books and pamphlets and 11 scholarly journals, including the still-thriving American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, and the Journal of Near Eastern Studies. For its first three years the Press was an entity completely divide from the University; it was operated by the Boston publishing house D. C. Heath in combination with the Chicago printer R. R. Donnelley. This arrangement proved unworkable, however, and in 1894 the University officially took responsibility for the Press. It started to publish books by scholars outside the University of Chicago in 1905. By 1931, the Press had established itself as a leading academic publisher. Leading books of this era were: Dr. Edgar J. Goodspeed's The New Testament: An American Translation (perhaps the first nationally successful Press title) and its successor, Goodspeed's 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.

In 1966, Morris Philipson began his tenure as director of the Press, a position he occupied for 33 years. Philipson dedicated time and resources to building the backlist of the Press. Philipson became known for taking on determined scholarly projects, among the largest of which was The Lisle Letters a vast collection of 16th-century correspondence left behind by Arthur Plantagenet, First Viscount Lisle, containing a wealth of information about all aspects of life in that era. While the scholarly output of the Press expanded, the Press also made strides as a trade publisher when both of Norman Maclean's books A River Runs Through It and Young Men and Fire made the national best-seller list in 1992 and Robert Redford made a movie of A River Runs through It. The Press also publishes regional titles, such as 1999's One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko, a collection of columns by Mike Royko, who was a Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago Tribune newspaperman. In 1982, Philipson became the first director of an academic press to win one of PEN's most prestigious awards, the Publisher Citation. Shortly before he retired in June 2000, Philipson was awarded the Association of American Publishers' Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing, an award given to a person whose "creativity and leadership have left a lasting mark on American publishing."