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The practice of subscription book publication left a small but vivid mark on the literary culture of the English eighteenth century. In this essay I want to suggest some new ways of reading the mark it left, and to raise certain questions about the period mentality behind the practice. My treatment of the subject here is meant not to challenge the findings of the scholarship accumulated so far-most of which seems to me unchallengeable on quality and result-but instead to indicate undeveloped and (as I would argue) worthwhile possibilities of study, putting the emphasis on what contemporary readers and authors themselves thought about this form of getting books into print.
Just to summarize first a few facts about this subject, more or less well known: subscription books were published with the production cost underwritten by advance purchase agreement from among many individual buyers subscribing for one or more copies of the projected book. The author proposed to produce a book of specified subject matter, length, and format-a folio history or a survey of antiquities, a new translation of a classical text, a collection of topographical or architectural engravings, a little volume of miscellaneous poems on the inevitable "several occasions"-and solicited subscriptions, personally and through friends or agents. Subscribers usually paid half the price at the time of subscribing, with the remainder on delivery, and got to see their names printed at the front of the volume. The bookseller was also party to the arrangement, often including a right to sales of copies beyond those subscribed for.'
Books published by subscription can be traced back as far as 1617, but the practice established itself as an important alternative method of publication only in the eighteenth century (Clapp, "Beginnings" 205). By 1701 fewer than a hundred books had been issued in this way. Between 1701 and 1801 the total reached at least 2,000 and probably more like 3,000.2 The first decade of the eighteenth century saw about 40 books published by subscription. That number doubled to 91 during the next ten years, followed suddenly then in the decade of the 1720s by a dramatic spike in the number to some 270 such books. And for the rest of the century the average per decade ran around 250...