Bookseller: OUP accounts 1989 (original) (raw)
OUP held back by printing division
Digest of OUP's annual report and accounts in The Bookseller, Company News, 13th October 1989
The report of the delegates of the Oxford University Press for the year to end-March 1989 shows a sharp decline in the fortunes of the press. This is attributed in the report to "difficulties in the printing division that became so severe that the delegates took the decision, with the advice of outside consultants, to close the main operations, which finally ceased at the beginning of May 1989".
By December 1988 OUP was expecting a full year loss in the printing division of around £1.6 million on a turnover of £6 million. It was this, the delegates report, that caused a drop in pretax profit to £94 million (1988, £11.8 million). Sales were more encouraging, showing a 20 per cent increase to £118 million.
The year was one of considerable change for OUP. It saw Robin Denniston, George Richardson and Richard Charkin, the architects of its recovery in recent years, leave. Sir Roger Elliott took over as secretary, and organisational changes soon followed. The academic division was split into two parts. The new arts and reference division, taking in academic publishing in the arts, reference and paperback lists, dictionaries, music and bibles, saw Dr Ivon Asquith appointed managing director. Dr John Manger was appointed managing director of the new science, medical and journals division, which includes SciMed Books, IRL Press, Oxford Journals and Oxford Electronic Publishing.
The publishing highlight of OUP's year was the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, launched on 21st March. The five year project required an investment of £million, with valuable assistance from IBM. "lt seems unlikely that the press can recover the whole [of the investment], and certainly not the investments made in the original work and in the Supplements. It must be subsidised by the surplus made on other sales," says the report. The third edition of the OED is now planned for the first decade of the next century. Subject to resources, the delegates would also like to be able to supplement and revise the Dictionary of National Bibliography (sic).
During the year OUP produced 1,500 new publications. It now has 2,500 in print. The company's long horizons are demonstrated by the music department: it published the first volume in the C P E Bach Edition - there will be 98 more volumes. In philosophy the new Oxford Ethics series saw its first title - Kagan's The Limits of Morality - and in literature Hill's A Turbulent Seditious and Fractious People: John Bunyan and His Church won the W H Smith Literary Award.
The English language teaching division, with publishing centres in New York and Oxford, publishes in British and American English. Twenty two per cent of its sales are in American English selling into the US and the Far East. Nearly all British English sales are to Europe, and it is finding a ready market among adults keen to improve their English. The educational division suffered, as did many similar publishers, from the changes affecting examinations for 16 year olds, but it reported good overseas sales and children's book sales. Sales to primary schools also increased substantially, largely a result of the take-up of the Oxford Reading Tree.
OUP continues to flourish in the US, where it published 319 new titles. Sadly the successful year, report the delegates, "was overshadowed by the tragic death of David Trimmer-Smith, our marketing and export sales director, in the Pan Am crash at Lockerbie". The delegates also report sales in its branches (foreign offices in Canada. India, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, East Asia, Eastern Africa, Southern Africa and Pakistan) up by 20 per cent. It says this was helped by an improvement in foreign currencies and flourishing domestic publishing programmes.
Click for Bookseller OUP accounts digest, 1990.
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