Short answers, pulled from the story.
The University of Chicago Press was founded in 1890, making it one of the oldest continuously operating university presses in the United States. For its first three years it was operated in conjunction with the Boston publishing house D. C. Heath and the Chicago printer R. R. Donnelley; the university formally assumed control in 1894.
The first book published by the University of Chicago Press was Robert F. Harper's Assyrian and Babylonian Letters Belonging to the Kouyunjik Collections of the British Museum. It sold only five copies in its first two years.
The first edition of The Chicago Manual of Style was published in 1906. It emerged from the manuscript editing and proofreading department the press established while compiling the Decennial Publications beginning in 1902.
Morris Philipson served as director of the University of Chicago Press from 1966 to 2000, a tenure of 34 years. He was the first director of an academic press to win PEN's Publisher Citation, in 1982, and shortly before retiring he received the Association of American Publishers' Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing.
Under director Garrett P. Kiely, who took the role on the 1st of September 2007, the press publishes approximately 280 new books and 70 paperback reprints each year, along with 92 journal titles. The press employs more than 300 people across its books, journals, and distribution divisions.
BiblioVault is a digital repository for scholarly books operated as a quasi-independent project of the University of Chicago Press. It was developed through the Chicago Digital Distribution Center with funding from the Mellon Foundation beginning in 2001.