A research database · continually expanding
A searchable record of the printed books that Oxford and Cambridge college libraries subscribed to in the eighteenth century.
About the project
Subscription publishing was a distinctive feature 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. Even though subscription publishing made up a small proportion of the book trade in this period, such subscriptions are important because they display a willingness to support a book financially beyond the more common acts of purchase, a desire to make an institution or individual's interest in it public, and a diffuse form of literary patronage. Many of these aspects of subscription publishing have been considered in the case of the individual subscriber, but the institutional subscriber has not elicited much scholarly interest. Yet these institutional subscriptions record something distinctive: the books that a library chose to support, and to place on its shelves, as a matter of corporate decision.
The website currently contains a fully searchable database of all the Oxford and Cambridge college library subscriptions in the eighteenth century. It is my belief that it is nearly comprehensive, though the odd subscription might have been missed through human error. My ultimate aim is to extend the database beyond Oxford and Cambridge to other institutional subscribers — cathedral and parochial libraries, the Inns of Court, learned societies, and subscription and circulating libraries — so that the wider place of institutions in the subscription economy might be reconstructed. Corrections and additions are warmly welcomed.
— Jacob Donald Chatterjee, New College, Oxford