Cambridge University Press today

Cambridge University Press is the printing and publishing house of the University of Cambridge. It is an integral part of the University and is devoted constitutionally to printing and publishing for "the acquisition, advancement, conservation, and dissemination of knowledge in all subjects". As such, it is a charitable, not-for-profit organisation, free from tax worldwide. For centuries, the Press has extended the research and teaching activities of the University by making available through its printing and publishing a remarkable range of academic and educational books, journals and Bibles.

Today the Press is one of the largest academic and educational publishers in the world, publishing nearly 2,500 books and over 150 journals a year, which are sold in some 200 countries. For millions of people around the globe, the publications of the Press thus represent their only real link with the University of Cambridge.

The Press is now in a true sense a "world publisher". English is the dominant language of scholarship and science, and the Press seeks to attract the best authors and to publish the best work in the English language worldwide; it currently has over 24,000 authors in 108 countries, including well over 8,000 in the USA , over 1,300 in Australia, and over 100 each (and rising fast) in countries as diverse as Japan, Russia, South Africa, Spain and Israel. The Press publishes and distributes the whole of this varied output through its own network around the world: there are branches in North America, Australia, Africa, South America, Iberia and East Asia, all representing the whole list, supported by sales oYces in every major centre; there are editorial offces in Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Cape Town, Madrid and Singapore, each contributing their own related publishing programmes; and the Press's websites are visited by over 2.5 million people worldwide.

Cambridge is also unusual in maintaining a Printing Division, which has been through an equally dramatic evolution in the last 150 years. In the 1850s, the University Press was predominantly a printing business and primarily a printer of Bibles and prayer books. Today, the Press has a large modern Printing House with leading-edge technology: it was the Wrst UK printer to install an eight-unit colour printing machine; it handles every kind of work from traditional craft binding to electronic database management; it is the market leader in new typesetting systems to support both electronic and printed publications; and it produces a vast range of scholarly and educational books and journals, not only for the Press's Publishing Division but also for many other academic publishers and organisations throughout the world.

Since 1980 the Printing and Publishing Divisions have shared the same 30-acre (12-hectare) site on the southern side of Cambridge, a mile or so from the heart of the University. In the city centre are also the Pitt Building (1833) in Trumpington Street, and the Press Bookshop at 1 Trinity Street, situated just opposite the University Senate-House, on the oldest bookshop site in the UK, where the whole Press list of more than 20,000 titles is on display.

The future will see more growth and diversity as the Press publishes in new formats and media, establishes a presence in emerging educational markets, responds to intellectual developments in the subject areas where it is already active, and continuously invests in technological change to improve its production, distribution and information systems. But the whole of this great expansion remains essentially an organic development, directly related to the Press's statutory aims and realised through a unitary, international printing and publishing organisation, with its physical and constitutional centre in Cambridge.