The Cambridge University Press 1696-1712 : A Bibliographical Study. [ 2 volumes, complete ]

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, first edition, 1966. 2 vols, cloth, 4to, 28 cm,. xv, 432 +ix, 381 pp, ills, 8 plates (incl. 4 colour diagrams.) facs, tables. Vol 1 : Organization and policy of the Cambridge University Press. -Vol. 2 : 1st Minute book, accounts and vouchers. From the blurb: "Professor McKenzie's study of the Cambridge University Press in the time of Queen Anne gives a detailed picture of the Press in this period. As the first study in depth of a hand-press house, it provides an essential basis for much bibliographical and textual work in early printed books. The Press records on which the work is based form, in their detail and comprehensiveness, a unique collection of printing-house documentation. The entries in the Curator's Minute Book provide the fullest extant account of printing charges in these years; the Annual Press Accounts show clearly the kind of expenditure which a small printing-house incurred; and many of the Vouchers reveal the week-by-week operations of the Press in great detail. The testimony of all these documents to printing and book-trade practice is an important contribution to the meagre fund of primary evidence at present available on these subjects. They allow new insights into such topics as printing-house design, staff ratios and turnover, deployment of staff, the purchase of types and equipment, the maintenance of equipment, compositors'and pressmen's output, the wages they received, press-figures, shared work, book prices, edition sizes, and so on. All books and other items printed by the Press (and the period includes Bentley's ' Horace ' and the second edition of Newton's ' Principia ') are listed in a detailed bibliography, which gives precise information on each book's production, identifying sheet by sheet the compositors, correctors, and pressmen who worked on it. There is also an inventory of all the types used at the Press, with notes on their design, origin, cost and quantity. All the documents on which the narrative in the first volume is based are reproduced in the second volume". An ex-library set with labels taped at the foot of the spines, and a ribbon sticker around the boards, bookplates on the front pastedown endpapers, library stamps on the prelims including the title-page, otherwise Good.