MIT Press

About MIT Press

The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, publishing books and journals in fields such as art, architecture, cognitive science and computer science.

Its roots lie in a 1926 lecture series at MIT. The institute's publishing imprint, the Technology Press, was set up in 1932 and renamed the MIT Press in 1961. Its distribution partnership with John Wiley & Sons, in place since 1937, ended in 1962, when Carroll Bowen became its first director; later directors include Frank Urbanowski (from 1975), Ellen Faran (2003) and Amy Brand (2015). The press's design director Muriel Cooper created its colophon in 1964, a design the Museum of Modern Art acquired in 2023.

Notable first editions include Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, a large-format book designed by Cooper that the authors replaced with a smaller revised edition in 1977, and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1984) by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman.

The press set up a journals division in 1972 and now publishes more than forty journals. It released its first open access book in 1995 and launched the Direct to Open model for monographs in 2021. The MIT Press Bookstore opened in Kendall Square in 1980 and moved into a new building on Main Street in 2022.