MIT Press

The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT published under its own name a lecture series entitled Problems of Atomic Dynamics given by the visiting German physicist and later Nobel Prize winner, Max Born. Six years later, MIT's publishing operations were first formally instituted by the creation of an imprint called Technology Press in 1932. This imprint was founded by James R. Killian, Jr., at the time editor of MIT's alumni magazine and later to become MIT president. Technology Press published eight titles independently, then in 1937 entered into an arrangement with John Wiley & Sons in which Wiley took over marketing and editorial responsibilities. In 1962 the association with Wiley came to an end after a further 125 titles had been published. The press acquired its modern name after this separation, and has since functioned as an independent publishing house.[2]

A European marketing office was opened in 1969, and a Journals division was added in 1972. In the late 1970s, responding to changing economic conditions, the publisher narrowed the focus of their catalog to a few key areas, initially architecture, computer science and artificial intelligence, economics, and cognitive science.[2]

In January 2010 the MIT Press published its 9000th title,[2] and in 2012 the Press celebrated its 50th anniversary, including publishing a commemorative booklet on paper and online.[3]

The press co-founded the distributor TriLiteral LLC with Yale University Press and Harvard University Press. TriLiteral was acquired by LSC Communications in 2018.[4]

MIT Press primarily publishes academic titles in the fields of Art and Architecture; Visual and Cultural Studies; Cognitive Science; Philosophy; Linguistics; Computer Science; Economics; Finance and Business; Environmental Science; Political Science; Life Sciences; Neuroscience; New Media; and Science, Technology, and Society.[5]

The MIT Press is a distributor for such publishers as Zone Books[6] and Semiotext(e). In 2000, the MIT Press created CogNet, an online resource for the study of the brain and the cognitive sciences.[7] The MIT Press co-owns the distributor TriLiteral LLC with Harvard University Press and Yale University Press.[8]

In 1981 the MIT Press published its first book under the Bradford Books imprint, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology by Daniel C. Dennett.

In 2018, the Press and the MIT Media Lab launched the Knowledge Futures Group to develop and deploy open access publishing technology and platforms.

In 2019, the Press launched the MIT Press Reader, a digital magazine that draws on the Press's archive and family of authors to produce adapted excerpts, interviews, and other original works. The publication describes itself as one which "aims to illuminate the bold ideas and voices that make up the Press’s expansive catalog, to revisit overlooked passages, and to dive into the stories that inspired the books".[9]

The MIT Press also operates the MIT Press Bookstore[10] showcasing both its front and backlist titles, along with a large selection of complementary works from other academic and trade publishers. The retail storefront was formerly located next to a subway entrance to Kendall/MIT station in the heart of Kendall Square, but has been temporarily moved to 301 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a short distance north of the MIT Museum near Central Square. Once extensive construction around its former location is completed, both the Bookstore and the MIT Museum will move to a new building adjacent to the subway entrance.[11]

The Bookstore offers customized selections from the MIT Press at many conferences and symposia in the Boston area, and sponsors occasional lectures and book signings at MIT.

The Bookstore is also known for its periodic "Warehouse Sales" offering deep discounts on surplus, damaged, and returned books and journals from its own catalog, as well as remaindered books from other publishers.

The Press uses a colophon or logo designed by its longtime design director, Muriel Cooper, in 1962.[12] The design is based on a highly abstracted version of the lower-case letters "mitp", with the ascender of the "t" at the fifth stripe and the descender of the "p" at the sixth stripe the only differentiation.[13] It later served as an important reference point for the 2015 redesign of the MIT Media Lab logo by Pentagram.[12]

The Arts and humanities

Economics

International affairs, history, and political science

Science and technology

• The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch, 1960[17]
• Experiencing Architecture by Steen Eiler Rasmussen, 1962[18]
• Beyond The Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, 1963[19]
• The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman, 1967[20]
• Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago by Hans M. Wingler, 1969[21]
• The Subjection Of Women, by John Stuart Mill, 1970[22]
• Theory of Colours by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1970[23]
• Learning From Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, 1972[24]
• The Theory of Industrial Organization by Jean Tirole, 1988[25]
• Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge by Michael L. Dertouzos, Robert M. Solow and Richard K. Lester, 1989[26]
• Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson and Ronald L. Rivest, 1990[27]
• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, 1994[28]
• The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith), 1994[29]
• Financial Modeling by Simon Benninga, 1997[30]
• Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming, 2000[31]
• The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly, 2001[32]
• The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich, 2001[33]
• Theoretical Neuroscience: Computational and Mathematical Modeling of Neural Systems by Peter Dayan and L.F. Abbott, 2001[34]
• The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda, 2006[35]
• 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick, 2007[36]
• Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, 2016[37]
• Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein, 2018[38]

• Official website
• MIT Press Journals homepage
• The MIT PressLog (news blog for the MIT Press)