College dons have become embroiled in a bitter row over plans to axe more than 150 jobs at Cambridge University Press - the oldest continually operating book publisher in the world.
Established under charter from Henry VIII 425 years ago and responsible for works by John Milton, Isaac Newton, and, more recently, Stephen Hawking, the publisher was set to play a leading role in this year's celebrations to mark the university's 800th anniversary.
But the carefully-choreographed world of Nobel prize-winning scientists, King's College choristers and Footlights comedians has been shaken by news that scores of local printers' jobs are under threat.
Management argues that the move has been forced on them as the industry changes from lithographic to digital production. But critics claim the redundancies will be the beginning of the end for a world-renowned operation that recently printed Lord Stern's hugely influential review on climate change.
The CUP is a charity that is supervised by a "Syndicate" of 18 academics from the highest echelons of the university.
Representatives from the shop floor and the Unite union took their case direct to the Syndicate, which is chaired by Dr Gordon Johnson, the president of Wolfson College, and includes economist philosopher Amartya Kumar Sen, former master of Trinity College.
They say their arguments were sympathetically received and that this has led to a change in tack from the former accountant and current chief executive of the press, Stephen Bourne and his fellow-managers.
Tomorrow, Unite is set to meet CUP management again, amid mounting hope that at least half of the jobs threatened by the restructuring will be saved in what looks like a U-turn by the publishers.
But the management is more cautious. Peter Davison, CUP's corporate affairs director, confirms that the company is trying to soften the blow in a harsh employment environment but says structural change in the printing industry has swept away pretty much every lithographic printing company in the high-cost south of England.
"We needed to take action because we saw losses of £2m annually for the next three years. We estimate that if we reduce the number of redundancies to 60 it would mean ongoing annual losses of £300,000 which we can tolerate for the time being, but it's not as though we are free from the technological writing which is on the wall," says Davison.
The unions are convinced that the direct appeal to the dons has paid dividends but no one inside the Syndicate was available to comment and Davison denied that management was buckling under pressure from the Syndicate.
"The decision to backtrack has resulted from an acknowledgement that deteriorating employment conditions put it under a duty, if at all possible, to at least put off wider cuts as long as possible," said Davison, adding: "I am not aware of any intervention by the Syndicate."
Whatever the truth, the pressures on a printing division that was once seen by many in the university as a cash cow along with its examination board, look unlikely to go away and are spreading throughout the wider publishing operation. Setting up a digital printing operation costs a lot of upfront money - cash that CUP says it has not got - but once up and running can be much cheaper and flexible to run.
Similarly, academics who used to rely on hardback books to help climb the career ladder have more recently been turning to the kind of self-publishing and free distribution offered by the internet.
The press still employs 1,000 people in its home town and a further 800 overseas who look after the 25,000 titles in print. About 80% of its business now comes from foreign markets and it has already established warehousing centres in New York, Melbourne and Tokyo.
Thousands of books printed in Cambridge are still air-freighted out of Britain to North America and Asia on a weekly basis, something that would have amazed many of its earlier authors.
Milton, however, would no doubt have enjoyed an honest row over printing at Cambridge. He wrote in 1644: "Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making."
How Henry VIII helped to create a publishing giant
For centuries, Cambridge University Press has had religious and scientific publishing at the centre of its operation, with bibles and prayerbooks making up a significant proportion of its total output.
CUP, which is owned by the university, is based to the south of the city, on Shaftesbury Road. It is the printer of the King James Bible, the world's best-known translation, which uses early 17th-century English. "Its powerful, majestic style has made it a literary classic," according to the CUP. The company, which is the oldest continually operating book publisher in the world, is also the printer to the Queen.
That status originated from letters patent which were granted to the university by King Henry VIII in 1534. Its first book was actually printed in 1584 and since then CUP has published many of the country's leading thinkers from John Milton to Charles Darwin through Bertrand Russell and on to Stephen Hawking.
The publishing house does not produce fiction but it can still cause controversy.
In 2007, it decided to destroy all remaining copies of a book published the year before - Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World - after a messy legal case brought by a Saudi billionaire. The decision was condemned by one American congressman as "basically a book burning."
• This article was amended on Tuesday 7 April 2009. Cambridge University Press's main base of operations lies to the south of the city, on Shaftesbury Road, rather than across the river Cam from King's College chapel, as we originally indicated in the above article. This has been corrected.