WHILE OUP’s preoccupation with standardized orthography can be traced back to Fell’s day, it was left largely to the Press’s seven-year-long apprentice system—during which time a compositor or reader would be immersed in the intricacies of Oxford style, and introduced to the small clique of redoubtable specialists—to absorb the accumulated knowledge required by the job. Those charged with correcting the work of scholars traditionally held a position of great esteem in academic and editorial circles: the elder D’Israeli described such men by saying, ‘it became the glory of the learned to be correctors of the press to eminent printers’.

One such reader in Hart’s day, J. C. Pembery—a reader for 70 years, who corrected Max Müller's Sanskrit even though he knew no word of the language—already held a formidable reputation in the learned world. Soon OUP were able to set texts in everything from Aramaic to Zend: hieroglyphics, Minoan, Sanskrit, Syriac, Sinhalese, Tamil, Gothic, Icelandic, Runic, Himyaritic, Lombardic, Phoenician, Tibetan, Etruscan, Kanarese, and Telugu are just some of the many writing forms available for print.

However, the expansion and reorganization Hart was charged with superintending demanded that the existing slow, traditional process of indoctrination and edification be standardized and streamlined. So it became part of Hart’s modernizing of the Press that he began to compile and draw up guidelines for the Press’s compositors and readers. Hart had been greatly interested in the subject since his own days as an indentured proofreader, and his list of rules—begun a decade earlier, and even by 1893 still fitting onto a single broadsheet (click for a pop-up image (185k)—would form the basis for the first of his Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford.

(Excerpts of the preceding text may be found on Oxford University Press’s ‘AskOxford’ website.)

Below is a list of all the editions of Hart’s little book, many of which have links to pages with more information about them; choose an edition and click on its link to see its description and the text of its preliminary matter. If you want to look at each edition in turn in a single linear progression (e.g. starting with the first edition and working through the second, third, etc.), follow the links at the foot of each edition’s page, which associate that edition with the one that preceded and followed it. The editions are from my own collection and that in the Oxford University Press’s museum; I am grateful for their allowing me to reproduce them here. If you know of any editions not linked below, I would be pleased to hear from you.

The original editions’ preliminary matter sometimes reprinted prefaces and notes from earlier editions. Here, however, for the sake of clarity and concision, prefaces and notes are not repeated in subsequent editions, but rather highlighted with a link to the edition in which they first appeared; once you have followed the link, click on your browser’ ‘Back’ button to return to your starting place, or use the linear links at the bottom of each page. Images from previous editions have been reduced in size for ease of downloading. Those with either broadband access or supreme patience can contact me for higher-resolution (300 dpi) versions.

I have not normalized the punctuation in the original texts; any marginal comments of my own are made in square brackets. To differentiate further the previously published text from other copy, it is displayed fully justified—in other words, aligned on both left and right margins. While the original uniformly has paragraphs set close-up with indents, in the interests of clarity I have adopted the usual Web convention of separating paragraphs with a line space.

Editions and impressions of Hart’s Rules, 1893–2000

• First edition April 1893, reprinted December 1894 (2nd)
  Reprinted with alterations
  • January 1895 (3rd)
  • February 1895 (4th)
  • January 1896 (5th)
  • July 1897 (6th)
  • September 1898 (7th)
  • April 1899 (8th)
  • August 1899 (9th)
  • January 1901 (10th)
  • February 1901 (11th)
  • January 1902 (12th)
  • March 1902 (13th)
  • May 1903 (14th)
• Fifteenth edition (the first for publication)
  revised and enlarged
  • March 1904
  • April 1904 (16th)
  • April 1904 (17th)
• Eighteenth edition
  again revised and enlarged
  • July 1904
• Nineteenth edition July 1905
• Twentieth edition July 1907
• Twenty-first edition January 1909
• Twenty-second edition
  revised and further enlarged
  • January 1912
• Twenty-third edition January 1914
  Reprinted with alterations
  • June 1918 (24th)
  • January 1921 (25th)
  • June 1921 (26th)
  • April 1925 (27th)
  • January 1928 (28th)
• Twenty-ninth edition
  revised and enlarged
  • May 1930
• Thirtieth edition June 1936
• Thirty-first edition December 1938
• Thirty-second edition September 1943
• Thirty-third edition February 1946
• Thirty-fourth edition June 1948
• Thirty-fifth edition July 1950
• Thirty-sixth edition 1952, reprinted
  • 1954
  • 1957 (with alterations)
  • 1961
  • 1962
• Thirty-seventh edition (completely revised) 1967
  reprinted with additions
  • 1970
  • 1974
• Thirty-eighth edition 1978
• Thirty-ninth edition 1983
  reprinted with corrections
  • 1984
  • 1986
  • 1987
  • 1989

To go to the main Hart Hart’s Rules edition page, click here.
To go to the main Collins Authors’ and Printers’ edition page, click here.
For a chronology of the Press during the period 1850–1925, click here.

 

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