25 things you might not have known about Cambridge University Press
- Our ‘Letters Patent’ (similar to a royal charter) were signed in 1584 by King Henry VIII, allowing us to print “all manner of books”.
- Our books are used to train the doctors of the future and two of them won the first Prize in their categories at the 2008 Medical Book Awards, by the British Medical Association.
- Nearly 2,000 people work for the Press all around the world.
- We have over 35,000 books in print. Of these, around 6,000 are also available as eBooks, with more being added every day.
- We have offices in 39 countries, and we distribute our products to nearly every country in the world.
- We publish around 36,000 authors from 122 different countries.
- The Press has published works by at least 52 Nobel Prize-winning authors, and our authors range from teachers in the classroom to business readers to research fellows to Nobel Laureates.
- Our titles are used by students, teachers and academics, and also by…rappers. In 2008 An Introduction to Astrobiology was used by British rapper Jon Chase to promote space science to a wider audience, including breakfast TV viewers in the United Kingdom.
- We publish over 2,500 new books every single year.
- Our books and products are translated into 70 languages.
- We publish over 240 research journals, spanning more than 32 subject areas, from Behavioural and Brain Sciences to twentieth century music, which studies progressive rock to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.
- Our bestselling books range from Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology to English Grammar in Use to Romeo and Juliet.
- We were one of the first publishers to use widgets. Not the widgets used in beer cans, but the widgets that allow you to view and share a preview of the title you are thinking of buying. We have 225 widgets currently in use, and this will continue to grow.
- Our stockholding is currently around 16 million units in nine warehouses around the world. The Cambridge warehouse handles approximately 11 million books every year, and our warehouse in West Nyack distributed over 6 million books in 2008.
- Our bookshop stands at the very heart of Cambridge and is the oldest bookshop site in England, as books have been sold from there since at least 1581.
- We are the world’s oldest Bible publisher. Our first Bible, printed in 1591, was an edition of the Geneva Bible – the translation that crossed to America with the Pilgrim Fathers.
- The Press was the first to use the world’s first automated printing machine in 1805. It was called the Stereotype Press and it worked by making moulds of whole pages of type and then casting metal plates form the moulds so that whole pages can be reproduced, without the typesetter having to set every individual letter.
- We bring out-of-print books back from the dead. Our “Lazarus” project uses digital print on-demand technology that can generate a book within an hour. 13,000 books have been brought back to life in this way, with many more to follow.
- We are leading the way in creating new ways for teachers to get teaching materials for their lessons. Our new Global Grid for Learning (GGFL) website offers a ‘content supermarket’ for teachers worldwide.
- In November 2008, our partnership with the Britten Sinfonia, also based in Cambridge, beat companies such as Rolls Royce and the London Symphony Orchestra to become the winners in the international category at the United Kingdom’s Arts and Business Awards.
- Our famous authors range from Isaac Newton to Charles Darwin to Stephen Hawking.
- Over 30 million learners around the world use Cambridge’s English Language Teaching series In Use for their studies.
- In the United Kingdom, we have been accredited with ISO:14001, a prestigious standard awarded by the International Organization for Standardization which recognizes our use of non-wasteful materials and processes.
- We are the world’s leading publisher on climate change. We publish the full debate, which includes Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, which makes the case for environmental optimism, to Sir Nicholas Stern‘s Review on the Economics of Climate Change, which looks at what climate change is going to mean for the human race. We are also proud to publish the Nobel Prize-winning reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
- We also walk the walk when it comes to the environment and recycle up to 94% of waste at our Cambridge office. This is one of the highest percentages in the industry.