Identity area
Type of entity
Corporate body
Authorized form of name
Yale University Press
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1908-
History
Yale University Press was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. He would act as director until the mid-1940s when he became Chairman of the Board. For the next 15 years there was succession of directors that included Edgar Furniss, Norman Donaldson, and, in 1959, Chester Kerr, who oversaw the Press for the next twenty years. Also in 1959, the Press moved its headquarters from 143 Elm Street to 149 York Street. The year 1961 brought two major changes. The Press formally became a department of Yale, further enhancing its ties to the University (though it remained, and still remains, financially and operationally autonomous), and in the same year it established a London branch—then called Yale University Press, Limited—to sell books abroad. Nearly a decade later the role of the London branch began to expand, in part due to Yale University’s commitment to assist in the publishing efforts of the Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, established in London in 1970. In 1973, John Nicoll was hired to oversee the Press’s London office, which he did for the next thirty years, developing it into a full-fledged editorial division with its own acquisitions strategy and identity, its own reputation for excellence, and its own specialties—not least among them the publishing of extremely high quality, critically acclaimed art books and distinguished works of social history. The name of the division was changed to Yale University Press, London, in 1984, and today the London office, overseen by its present director, Robert Baldock, is responsible for nearly one third of Yale University Press’s titles
In 2001 Yale partnered with Harvard University Press and MIT Press to create TriLiteral LLC, a limited liability partnership to manage distribution of all three presses’ publications, and together built a 155,000-square-foot warehouse and distribution center in Rhode Island.