This third and “for the present” (xv) final volume of David McKitterick's history of the University Press at Cambridge is an account of scholarly publishing, set against the backdrop of dramatic changes in the world of higher education in the century between 1873 and 1972. The book incorporates the intellectual and cultural, as well as the commercial, aspects of publishing as practiced by one of the two ancient universities of England. Readers of McKitterick's brilliant and polemical Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (an expansion of his Lyell Lectures, also published at Cambridge in 2004) will not be surprised at the strong emphasis on printing as part of the history of a university publisher. Indeed the opening paragraphs of the first chapter, which describes “a century of change,” exhaustively address paper, type, illustration, and binding. Only after these core subjects are thoroughly covered does McKitterick enter into such questions as university reform, changing practices of the book trades, and the dynamics of an international publishing business.

The very structure of the book reflects not only the author's commitment to printing and book design, but also the trajectory of the press through the period. In the 1870s, the Cambridge University Press was more important as a printer than as a publisher. Orders for printing—from the university for examination papers, from other publishers for typographical challenges like mathematics, and from the various organizations and businesses that supplied the ubiquitous Bible trade—took precedence over the nurturing and dissemination of scholarship. A whole chapter is devoted to Macmillan, the London firm that dominated scholarly publishing in both Cambridge and Oxford for decades. Changes began in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, as new academic disciplines (notably history) entered the academy and came to the attention of its publishers. The Cambridge Modern History was a major project of the 1890s and 1900s; it was followed by further multivolume collaborative histories, of English literature, of the medieval and ancient worlds, and of the British Empire, among others. McKitterick characterizes 1900–1916 as “a difficult period,” not only because the First World War meant that German contributors to the Cambridge Medieval History had become enemy aliens, but because the Bible business was in decline, and because a massive investment in Monotype equipment became necessary. The press was central to the typographical renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, when Walter Lewis and Stanley Morison transformed the practices of typography and book design. The war years 1939–45 were hard, with both authors and staff away on military service, paper severely rationed, and the habits of the reading public becoming unstable. In the postwar decades, the benefits to the press of rapidly expanding education systems (and hence markets for textbooks and monographs) all over the world competed with the hardships imposed by wage and price controls and later by inflation. By the 1970s, however, the press had become an internationally known and respected publisher, with a flourishing New York branch, and its printing operation had been made an independent unit.

Like its predecessors, New Worlds for Learning is an authoritative and comprehensive volume, organized to meet the needs of several constituencies. Not all of these readers will require a history of the press for its own sake. Those interested in the history of scholarly publishing in Britain will welcome an account that is much fuller than Peter Sutcliffe's pointedly titled The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (1978). This history is a formal one, thoroughly documented but still a compelling narrative with its share of evocative anecdotes. When we learn that the travelers working in the Bible department of Cambridge's London warehouse before 1914 were known for “noisy camaraderie” and for dressing in frock coats and silk top hats, the latter “regularly ironed so as to remain fresh,” we are alert and prepared for the assertion, equally counterintuitive, that “the Bible trade was often vicious” (219). Another group of readers will merely consult McKitterick's volumes for valuable background knowledge of the publishing careers of Cambridge authors in the sciences, in mathematics, and in the humanities, or for accounts of major collaborative projects like the Revised Version of the Bible, the Cambridge Modern History, or the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Both of these broad readership categories will be grateful for the service McKitterick and the press have offered to scholarship by making this detailed narrative history available.

McKitterick aims to set his story in the context of Cambridge University (and other universities), of schools, of rival publishers, of rival printers, and of learned societies. It is an intensely local history, and the attentive reader will learn much about the politics of Cambridge, its colleges, and its booksellers. The reader must also come to terms with the London face of the press at Bentley House and the often fraught relationships between Cambridge and London. But “Cambridge” has a global and transnational meaning, too, and this account shows how the gentleman-scholars of a very old university learned to work with their authors, their customers, and their publishing counterparts in the United States and in various parts of the British Empire, both English-speaking and otherwise.

The archives of the Cambridge University Press, housed in the University Library, form the basis of this account of printing and book design mingled with scholarship and with marketing. McKitterick notes in the preface that the press archives are more than ten times what had been listed by Elisabeth Leedham-Green in her Guide to the Archives of the Cambridge University Press (Bishops Stortford, Chadwyck Healey, 1973). They are of course incomplete, especially from the London branch of the business, but enough remains for a detailed picture to be built up. Unlike the earlier volumes, this one also takes advantage of interviews with retired and active members of the press staff whose memories supplement the archival record.