Princeton University Press

• 1. Introduction

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  Princeton University Press opened its doors in 1905, founded by a recent Princeton graduate named Whitney Darrow with startup money from Charles Scribner II, a trustee of the university and partner in Charles Scribner's Sons. What began as a small, for-profit printer would spend the next century becoming one of the most decorated scholarly publishers in the world. How does a campus print shop evolve into the home of Einstein's first American book, the founding text of game theory, and the papers of Thomas Jefferson? And what does it mean for a press to be simultaneously independent and inseparable from one of the world's most prestigious universities? Those questions run through every chapter of this story.

• 2. From Printer to Publisher

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  Charles Scribner II's early investment gave Darrow the means to launch, but the press's identity shifted fundamentally when it was reincorporated as a nonprofit in 1910. That legal change set the direction: this would not be a commercial house chasing bestsellers. It would be a mission-driven organization whose purpose was to move scholarly ideas from the academy into wider circulation. The first book arrived in 1912: a new edition of Lectures on Moral Philosophy by John Witherspoon. It was a modest beginning, but the institutional intent was already clear.

  Albert Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity followed in 1922, making it his first book published in the United States. Two decades later, in 1944, the press published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, a work that helped establish the entire field of game theory. These were not incremental contributions to existing conversations. They were texts that opened new ones.

• 3. Monuments and Archives

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  In 1950, at a ceremony at the Library of Congress attended by President Harry S. Truman, Princeton University Press presented the first volume of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. The occasion itself signals how seriously the press and its partners took these long-form editorial projects: they were national events, not routine publications. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson would eventually run to sixty-nine volumes and earn a description as "one of the great editorial achievements in all history."

  The Bollingen Series arrived in 1969, when Paul Mellon donated it to the press. Its origins traced back to 1943, when Mary and Paul Mellon's Old Dominion Foundation established the Bollingen Foundation. Originally published by Pantheon Books, the series brought the press some 275 titles covering psychology, mythology, archaeology, art history, religion, and literature. The collected works of C. G. Jung, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Paul Valéry all came with it. A full reissuing of the Bollingen Series began in 2024, and a new translation of the Critical Edition of the Works of C. G. Jung is scheduled for 2026.

  The press also assembled The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, and in 2014 launched the Digital Einstein Papers: a free public platform providing the first comprehensive collection and English translation of Einstein's written legacy.

• 4. A Century of Recognition

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  Seven Princeton University Press books have won Pulitzer Prizes, beginning with George F. Kennan's Russia Leaves the War in 1957. Kennan's book also won the National Book Award for Nonfiction that same year, making it a double laureate in a single season. The Pulitzer run continued through Bray Hammond's Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War in 1958, Herbert Feis's Between War and Peace in 1961, Constance McLaughlin Green's Washington: Village and Capital in 1963, and Irwin Unger's The Greenback Era in 1965. Sebastian de Grazia's Machiavelli in Hell took the prize in 1989. Most recently, Benjamin Nathans's To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause won in 2024.

  More than fifty Princeton University Press authors have received Nobel prizes across economics, physics, chemistry, medicine, and literature. Claudia Goldin won the Nobel prize in economics in 2023 for her work on women's labor market outcomes; her book Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity was published by the press in 2021. Daron Acemoglu shared the 2024 Nobel prize in economics for research on economic growth and institutions.

  The press has also won five Bancroft Prizes, awarded by Columbia University trustees for books on diplomacy or the history of the Americas. At the 2020 London Book Fair, the press received the International Excellence Academic and Professional Publisher Award. The R.R. Hawkins Award, the top honor in the Association of American Publishers PROSE program, went to the press in 2023 for Spiderweb Capitalism by Kimberly Kay Hoang, and again in 2024 for The Voices of Nature by Nicolas Mathevon.

• 5. Expanding the Mission

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  Christie Henry became the press's ninth director in 2017, the first woman to hold the position. That year the press also opened a Beijing office, becoming the first university press to do so. From Beijing, the press built a business representing other publishers' titles in China: the University of Chicago Press became a client in 2022, W. W. Norton and Company followed in 2025, and Johns Hopkins University Press joined in 2026.

  In 2018, the press launched Princeton Audio, an in-house audio imprint that has released more than 200 audiobooks, including a recording of Karl Marx's Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. By 2022 the program had expanded to include a dedicated audiobook app and direct-to-consumer website sales, supported through a partnership with Glassboxx.

  The same year the audio imprint launched, the press began a strategic initiative to diversify its publishing. A global equity grant program followed in 2020, providing resources to authors under contract for manuscript development; most of those grants have supported authors with child and family care. In 2021 the press added Book Proposal Development Grants, pairing prospective authors with book coaches and press editors. Also in 2021, the press established PUP Speaks, an in-house speakers' bureau for select authors.

  A Publishing Fellowship launched in 2020 offers full-time, salaried positions with immersive training in nonfiction publishing, mentoring, and career coaching, aimed at broadening representation across the industry.

• 6. Partnerships and Tensions

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  In 2023, Princeton University Press entered a publishing partnership with Editorial Planeta US to support simultaneous publication of general interest titles in English and Spanish. The first title under that arrangement was Puerto Rico: A National History by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. Meléndez-Badillo had also collaborated with the performer Bad Bunny, writing short historical narratives to accompany Bad Bunny's album Debí Tirar Más Fotos.

  Not all of the press's recent moves have been uncontroversial. In 2020, Princeton University Press joined the Association of American Publishers in the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, citing concerns that the Internet Archive was facilitating copyright infringement of their books. The suit resulted in the removal of access to more than 500,000 books from readers around the world. In 2025, the press drew criticism when several staff members appeared in Chinese state media during an officially-sanctioned tour of sites in Xinjiang.

  Also in 2025, the press acquired Island Press, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit publisher focused on environmental topics including conservation, food systems, and urban planning. Island Press formally became a Princeton University Press imprint on the 1st of January 2026, extending the press's reach into environmental publishing.

• 7. The Legacy Library and Living Catalog

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  In 2012, the press launched the Princeton Legacy Library, using print-on-demand technology to return more than 2,700 out-of-print titles to availability. The project acknowledged a practical truth: scholarly books go out of print not because the ideas in them are exhausted, but because print runs end. Print-on-demand removed that ceiling.

  Today the press holds more than 10,000 titles in print and publishes more than 300 new nonfiction books each year from its headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey, with offices in Oxford, England, and Beijing, China. The catalog spans hard sciences through the humanities: the Annals of Mathematics Studies, the Princeton Series in Astrophysics edited by David N. Spergel, Princeton Field Guides, and the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series sit alongside recent titles by Mary Beard, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Edwidge Danticat. The press's notable authors list also includes Virginia Woolf, Carl Jung, and Richard Feynman, whose QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter appeared in 1985. With a full Bollingen reissue underway and a new C. G. Jung critical edition due in 2026, the press is actively reshaping how its back catalog reaches new readers.