The Evolution of Cambridge Publishing

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956 4to (25.5 cm), IX, 67 pp, 14 plates. Publisher's cloth and dust jacket (dj slightly foxed and stained, small tear at the head, tipped in bookplate). From the blurb: "The Master of Pembroke's Sandars Lectures for 1954 are here given permanent form. The first lecture, on 'The Bentley Revival', gives new information about the Press's first experiment in Publishing, and the general increase of activity under Bentley's direction in the early eighteenth Century. Recently discovered minutes and accounts of the period are illustrated, and their contents analysed: and Mr Roberts gives an entertaining account of the progress of the Suidas 'Lexicon' through the press. 'After The Royal Commission' shows the beginnings in nineteenth-century Cambridge of a publishing firm as it is understood to-day ; the development of a London publishing-house, the beginnings of advertising, the growth of a 'back list'. 'The Twentieth Century' begins with the publication of the 11th edition of the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' -- a controversial venture in commercial publishing. It then describes and illustrates the great typographical revival associated first with Mr Bruce Rogers and later with Mr Stanley Morison and Mr Walter Lewis. The later years are of course those in which Mr Roberts was Secretary to the Syndics, and he describes from the inside important stages in the growth of a modern publishing house."