Editing Oxford University Press (section)

===Closure of poetry list===
In November 1998, OUP announced the closure, on commercial grounds, of its modern poetry list. Andrew Potter, OUP's director of music, trade paperbacks and Bibles, told ''[[The Times]]'' that the list "just about breaks even. The university expects us to operate on commercial grounds, especially in this day and age."<ref name="Alberge">[http://www.akmedea.com/dedpoets.jpg Dalya Alberge, 'Anger over Dead Poets Society', The Times, 21st November 1998]</ref>  In the same article, the poet [[D. J. Enright]], who had been with OUP since 1979, said, "There was no warning. It was presented as a fait accompli. Even the poetry editor didn't know....The money involved is peanuts. It's a good list, built up over many years."<ref name="Alberge" /> In February 1999, Arts Minister [[Alan Howarth, Baron Howarth of Newport|Alan Howarth]] made a speech in Oxford in which he denounced the closure: "OUP is not merely a business. It is a department of the University of Oxford and has charitable status. It is part of a great university, which the Government supports financially and which exists to develop and transmit our intellectual culture....It is a perennial complaint by the English faculty that the barbarians are at the gate. Indeed they always are. But we don't expect the gatekeepers themselves, the custodians, to be barbarians."<ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/feb/04/danglaister Dan Glaister, 'Minister steps into Oxford poetry list row', The Guardian, 4 February 1999]</ref> Oxford's professor [[Valentine Cunningham]] wrote in the ''Times Higher Education Supplement'': "Increasingly, (OUP) has behaved largely like a commercial outfit, with pound signs in its eyes and a readiness to dumb down for the sake of popularity and sales....Sacking poets not because they lose money but because they do not make enough of it: it is an allegory of a university press missing the point, mistaking its prime purpose."<ref name="Mammon">[http://www.akmedea.com/mammon.jpg "Mammon's Imprint", The Times Higher Education Supplement, 12 February 1999].</ref> In March 1999 ''[[The Times Literary Supplement]]'' commissioned Andrew Malcolm to write an article under the strapline "Why the present constitution of the OUP cannot work".<ref>[http://www.akmedea.com/jericho.jpg Andrew Malcom, 'Don't go to Jericho: Why the present constitution of the OUP cannot work', Times Literary Supplement, 2 April 1999]</ref> A decade later, OUP's managing director, Ivon Asquith, reflected on the public relations damage caused by the episode: "If I had foreseen the self-inflicted wound we would suffer I would not have let the proposal get as far as the Finance Committee."<ref>[http://www.akmedea.com/OUPIV478.jpg Ivon Asquith letter to Roy Foster, quoted by Foster in 'The Poetry Question', Keith Robbins (ed), ''The History of Oxford University Press'', Vol IV, OUP, 2017, p478]</ref>