‘For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics have brought readers closer to the world's great literature’, declares a statement at the beginning of recent books in the series. ‘The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading.’ Indeed, in 1928, Woolf and Eliot wrote prefaces to Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone respectively. Two decades later, Greene contributed a foreword to the Oxford World's Classics edition of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. These introductions increased the appeal of older works, and continue to serve the reputation of the World's Classics as a major cultural enterprise.

This chapter focuses particularly on the late 1920s, at the time when Humphrey Milford (manager of the London branch of Oxford University Press) commissioned introductions by Woolf and Eliot. 1928 was a turning point in the history of modernism – the moment when commercial publishers published modernist writings that had previously been confined to little magazines and small presses. This was the year when the Modern Library reprinted Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in the United States. However, the Modern Library was very different from traditional series of classics such as Everyman's Library and the World's Classics. It was sold as a daring series of ‘complete and unabridged’ texts for readers who wanted to keep abreast of modern literature. The fact that Portrait of the Artist was reviewed as ‘slightly pornographic’ was unproblematic for the Modern Library, since Joyce's subversive reputation contributed to the commercial appeal of the series.

In contrast, the World's Classics published mostly out-of-copyright works and shied away from controversy. Oxford University Press, whose London branch bought the World's Classics from Grant Richards in 1905, was known for its Bibles, scholarly works and anthologies, not for literary experimentation. The group of Delegates who ran the press from Oxford were extremely reluctant to include contemporary fiction on the Oxford University Press list. Although the London office had a large autonomy, its successive managers preferred to avoid any conflict with Oxford.