A century of stories

Down the years many unforgettable children's stories have been launched from the home of Oxford University Press. The famous academic publisher has ensured spiralling book sales for children's favourites from Biggles to Peter Pan and from Winnie the Witch to Charley, Charlotte and the Golden Canary.

But in some ways the story of how one of the great academic publishing houses ended up as one of the world's most celebrated children's book publishers is a saga laced with sufficient pioneering spirit to be worthy of some of its more colourful, high-flying superstars.

This week, and in the coming months, the OUP will be celebrating the 100th birthday of Oxford's children's books, with worldwide sales now counted in the tens of millions.

By OUP standards - the university has been printing books since the late 15th century - the children's books section is still the attention-grabbing but beautifully-groomed baby of the house.

But it was a baby brought into the world to rescue the OUP at a time when its resources were being perilously stretched by the decades-long task of producing the Oxford English Dictionary.

The dictionary project began in the 1880s and was led by James Murray, who, with his long white beard, would not have looked out of place in any Merlin the Magician book. But with the completion of the dictionary falling well behind schedule, it was to be children's books that saved the day.

The story actually began long before 1907 with a girl called Alice and a university mathematics don. In Oxford, how could it really have been otherwise?

The starting point somehow just had to be when Charles Dodgson, accompanied by Lorina, Alice and Edith - the three eldest daughters of the dean of Christ Church - took a boat trip up the river to Godstow.

For it was to the OUP that Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) turned after he got around to producing a manuscript of the Alice stories he had famously narrated to the girls.

Alice in Wonderland was to be the first children's book published by the OUP, but it was to be a far from wonderful experience for all concerned.

Dodgson had presented the first manuscript volume of Alice's Adventures Underground with his own illustrations to Alice Liddell in 1864. But the well-known and obsessive artist John Tenniel was commissioned to illustrate the final expanded text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which the Christ Church don took to the OUP.

Under a private printing arrangement the OUP asked to produce 2,000 copies in red cloth gilt. With only 50 copies completed, Dodgson was contacted by a mightily dissatisfied Tenniel, fuming about the way the pictures came out. Not only was the order immediately cancelled but the few recipients of presentation copies were asked to return them.

Rather than being destroyed, the rejected copies, now worth millions, were presented to children's hospitals. The original printing plate of the rare first edition of Alice is kept in the OUP's excellent museum, created in the company's Walton Street headquarters.

The archivist Martin Maw, who has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the press, said: "People are always surprised to learnt that in 1865 the OUP printed what is widely recognised as the novel which marks the start of modern children's literature.

"For Alice in Wonderland was the first book-length adventure to engage a child's mind and to capture its sense of the absurd."

Mr Maw, attempted to show me why the artist had blown a fuse.

"If you look carefully, you can see where the ink has blotched and it's slightly too dark."

It struck me that were Tenniel alive today, he would make David Bailey look a man of extreme modesty.

So, not the best of starts for the OUP.

But needs must.

And what the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was to call "the greatest enterprise of its kind in history" - which was to involve hundreds of people in an endeavour to find literally the meaning of everything - had to be kept afloat by stories for children.

The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary is still counted by some as Oxford's greatest gift to the world.

It certainly brought together more eccentrics than you would find in a Charles Dickens novel.

It also happened to be massively costly, and the first edition of the dictionary, first proposed in 1857, was not completed until 1928, with the ten volumes containing 15,490 pages.

Mr Maw said: "Because of the dictionary, the OUP had to look outside scholarly and religious publications to survive. The company had to generate more revenue to pay for the dictionary,"

If James Augustus Henry Murray was the towering figure behind the OED, Sir Humphrey Sumner Milford is the man who added children's books to the OUP global empire.

After being appointed assistant to the OUP delegates in 1900, he moved to the OUP London office.

"His London neighbours included Ernest Hodder Williams, and Milford soon entered into an agreement with Hodder & Stoughton to publish children's literature." said Mr Maw.

"So it almost all came about by accident.

"Many found Milford a baffling character. He assumed that if anyone had a university education that they should have enough initiative to get on with the job, without any guidance whatso- ever."

It was quickly recog- nised that there existed a massive market for books which, rather than presenting young readers with tales carrying heavy moral lessons, simply asked to be enjoyed for their own sake.

"It was a question of seeing children's books as a distinct market. In Victorian times there was a perception that children were like little adults, who only read at a slower pace."

One of the first children's fiction titles published by the new imprint in 1907 was an edition of Tom Brown's School Days.

Early mainstays were books by Herbert Ely and Charles James L'Estrange, who between them produced hundreds of books under the name of Herbert Strang (or indeed, Mrs Herbert Strang when that was deemed more appropriate for girls' books).

The pair remained with OUP until they retired in 1938, during which time they published vast quantities of children's annuals, story collections and poetry collections.

The joint venture with Hodder & Stoughton ended in 1916, when all the stocks were sold to OUP. At a stroke OUP had acquired a valuable back-catalogue of 'recreative' children's literature which it published until the late 1940s.

In the 1940s Biggles dominated the children's list. Biggles Goes to War and Biggles Defies the Swastika were the first books published in a long series by Captain W E Johns. OUP published between two and three new titles in the series every year, which were massive sellers.

After the war, OUP's children's list was re-shaped and the firm began to build a reputation for publishing high-quality, prize-winning children's literature.

Titles published at this time included the modern classic Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce in 1958 and Rosemary Sutcliff's historical adventure series for children, beginning with The Eagle of the Ninth in 1956.

One of the best-loved authors of all time, Astrid Lindgren, responsible for the best selling Pippi Longstocking series, will be introduced to a new audience later this year.

A new Longstocking book in a gift edition will be published in September, featuring the acclaimed illustrator Lauren Child.

Today's list includes many award-winning titles by best-selling authors such as Tim Bowler, Gillian Cross, and Geraldine McCaughrean, who won a competition to write the official sequel to JM Barrie's Peter Pan, Peter Pan in Scarlet, one of the best-selling children's books of 2006.

The OUP's poetry list is long gone. But 100 years on, OUP continues to publish picture books, poetry, non-fiction, children's dictionaries and fiction.

When Oxford finally gets around to opening a museum of children's literature, there can be little doubt the story of OUP will feature prominently alongside the likes of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien and Philip Pullman.

But that is quite another story.