A research database · continually expanding
Institutional database →A searchable record of the books that celebrated writers, divines, philosophers, and artists acquired by subscription — and wished to be seen patronising.
About the project
Subscription publishing was an important aspect of the book trade of eighteenth-century Britain: readers paid in advance for a work, and their names were printed at the front of the finished volume. For the individual subscriber, an appearance in a subscription list therefore records two things at once: a book that the subscriber acquired, and a book that the subscriber was willing to be seen patronising. The lists accordingly offer a means of discovering the books that famous authors bought and the writers they chose to support in public.
This website records the appearances of notable writers, divines, philosophers, and artists in eighteenth-century subscription lists. Among the individuals whose subscriptions are recorded here are Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, Joseph Butler, Bernard Mandeville, Francis Atterbury, Edmond Halley, and Daniel Waterland. Authors who appear not to have subscribed to any books are listed as well: the apparent absence from the lists of figures, such as John Locke, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, is itself a finding worth recording, though further lists remain to be searched. The database will be continually added to. Corrections and additions are warmly welcomed.
— Jacob Donald Chatterjee, New College, Oxford