Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/459

SOME IMPORTANT EVENTS 405 deluged him with manuscripts. These were so many and so val- uable that in the quarterly statement of April, 1902, the President announced that the series would include ten volumes instead of three. And these volumes turned out to be, not ordinary octavos, but quartos. The ten volumes equaled twenty octavo volumes of five hundred pages each. In September, 1902, the University Record reported another enlargement in the scope of the Decennial Publications, saying : ' ' Arrangements have been made for the publi- cation of a second series of volumes in octavo." The number of volumes in this second series reached eighteen, making the total number of volumes twenty-eight. This extraordinary enlargement of the original plan of publishing three volumes proved to be a very serious strain on the resources of the University at a somewhat critical period. It involved an expense of above fifty thousand dollars. President Harper never wavered in his conviction that it was a wise investment, even amid the financial difficulties of those years. He summed up his estimate of its value in the April, 1904, quarterly statement, saying: The value of this enterprise to the University and to the University Press as a publishing organization has been, and will continue to be, inestimable. In previous reports I have emphasized its importance on the scientific side. It is safe to say that no series of scientific publications so comprehensive in its scope and of so great a magnitude has ever been issued at any one time by any learned society or institution, or by private enterprise. It was not expected that the Decennial Publications would return a financial profit. They did not. A very large number of volumes were distributed gratuitously among the libraries of the world. But it should be added that thousands were also sold. A number of the books went to several editions. More than half the expenditure involved was returned from the sale of the publi- cations, and this sale had not ceased at the end of the first quarter- century. The Decennial Publications contained the work of eighty-one contributors. An event occurred in 1902 which the writer is in doubt about setting down as important. He is in doubt as to whether President Harper considered it particularly important. But it is quite certain that at the time of its occurrence very many persons, inside