Clarendon Press

The Clarendon Press is an imprint of the Oxford University Press. It is named after the author of the OUP's first best-seller, the History of the Rebellion [i.e. the Civil War, 1642-1651] by Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon (1609–1674), which was published posthumously in three volumes, 1703-1707. As a mark of its gratitude, and with a share of the profits, Oxford University built a new house for its Press, called the Clarendon Building. The name Clarendon Press was first used as an imprint in 1713. (Before then, the 'place of publication' on the title page had been for fifteen years the Sheldonian Theatre, famous building that the university uses for graduation ceremonies, designed by Christopher Wren.)

The signification of the Clarendon Press has changed over the years. At first it served to designate those books printed in Oxford for a generally academic market - other, more commercial, titles were printed in London, under a licence from the OUP; the most profitable of all, bibles, had a separate Bible Press. It became a vehicle for what might seem extreme scholarship: the quintessential Clarendon Press book has been described as "one so impenetrably erudite that it was impossible to extract from it any passage likely to entice the non-specialist reader" (Sutcliffe, 1978). The imprint is applied to the academic books; the simple imprint Oxford University Press is applied to books of more general appeal.

The 'Clarendon' imprint was also used, for many years from the 1860s, to identify books for secondary school use - notably editions of Latin, Greek and English, French and German classics, as well as textbooks. The Clarendon Shakespeare series of Shakespeare's plays, for example, one to a volume, was popular well into the last quarter of the twentieth century; it has now been replaced by the Oxford School Shakespeare.

Although the imprint remains, there is now no organisation known as 'The Clarendon Press'. It has been subsumed into the Academic Division of the OUP.