On 3 July 1896, at one of the less regular meetings of the Delegates of Oxford University Press (OUP) held during the Long Vacation, approval was given to publication of the Oxford Classical Texts (OCT) series. This approval was the outcome of discussions and proposals over more than ten years; indeed, it would be possible to take any one of several dates as marking the start of the series. While these earlier discussions need to be reviewed in order to explain why the series developed as it did when it did, this is also a preliminary attempt to look generally at the early history of the Texts, and its focus is the period to 1939, although some later developments in the series will also be mentioned
