A tribute to the publishers of classic engineering science books: the Oxford Engineering Science Series

Back in December DTLR had a series of posts in tribute to the publishers of classic books in physics and atmospheric science.  I'd like to return to that theme by paying homage today to the Oxford Engineering Science Series.  As far as I know, the series began with the publication in 1974 of Synthesis of Planar Antenna Sources, by Donald R. Rhodes (Volume 1 of the series).  The last contributions I know of are Volume 51, Electromagnetic Waveguides and Transmission Lines, by Frank Olyslager, published in 1999, and a second edition of Volume 14, Engineering Rheology, by Roger I. Tanner, published in 2000.  

Here are a few members of the series in my personal book collection.

Volumes 2, 10, and 36 of the Oxford Engineering Science Series

As can be seen from the photo, these books were also branded as Oxford Science Publications.  Also illustrated in the photo, Peter Hagedorn's Non-Linear Oscillations (Volume 10) was another example of a member of the series that came out in a second edition (1988).  Unfortunately now even this edition appears to be out of print.  Other volumes with multiple editions include Collier & Thome's Convective Boiling and Condensation (3d edition, 1996) and Wesson's Tokamaks (4th edition, 2011), though this latter moved to the same publisher's International Series of Monographs in Physics (a series that continues to go strong today).  Other volumes actually appear in two-volume sets (collectively issued the same series number):  these include Jones' Methods in Electromagnetic Wave Propagation (1979) and Thornton's Science and Practice of Liquid-Liquid Extraction (1992).  Jones' book was issued in a second edition co-published by IEEE and Wiley (1994), in their Series on Electromagnetic Wave Theory.

In the photo, Hagedorn's book is flanked by Les Woods' 1975 book, The Thermodynamics of Fluid Systems (Vol. 2), and Beris & Edwards' 1994 contribution, Thermodynamics of Flowing Systems with Internal Microstructure (vol. 36).  (Woods was one of the series editors for many years as well.)  The Hagedorn and Beris & Edwards volumes illustrate the elegant blue and red livery of the paperback and hardback volumes of the series in its middle years.  The hardbacks even had gold trim on the covers; the photo does not do it justice.  Unfortunately, the paperback livery in the most recent years resembles that of other (less elegant) Oxford Science Publications.

Unfortunately I do not own a copy of Volume 25, The Physics of Fluid Turbulence, by W. David McComb (1990).  Interestingly, McComb later (2014) published a second work on turbulence, Homogeneous, Isotropic Turbulence:  Phenomonology, Renormalization and Statistical Closures, which appeared instead in Oxford's International Series of Monographs in Physics, where Wesson's Tokamaks also moved, as mentioned earlier.

As for the Oxford Engineering Science Series, like Academic Press's International Geophysics Series that I wrote about earlier, the publisher websites list them as active, but no new volumes have been published in a long time.  I do wonder if any of these series will continue (the McGraw-Hill and Addison-Wesley series I wrote about earlier seem to be long-defunct), given the dynamics of scientific publishing in recent years.