This event is made possible through the support of The Baskerville Society

Booking is now open. Price £40.00 for two days, including refreshments, lunch. Tickets are available HERE.

In the eighteenth century they called it publishing by subscription, in the twenty-first century it is known as crowdfunding. Whilst the terminology may vary, the practice of recruiting individual buyers in advance of publication to cover the expense of printing is a strategy common to all eras. It is an approach that has enabled the production of a whole range of printed matter from religious texts to works of fiction, from scientific volumes to newspapers, from prints to sheet music. Financial necessity was often the reason for prepaid printing; but subscription proposals were also useful for testing the market and launching a new work and the practice enabled the producers of printed matter to operate outside the constraints of usual publishing conventions.

Speakers at this two-day symposium include

• Peter Allen: ‘…for want of subscribers’: the differing fortunes of Baskerville’s medical texts

• Isabelle Baudino: Whose favourite reading? Female subscribers to illustrated history books in eighteenth-century Britain

• Joshua Ehrlich: Subscription publishing and the eighteenth-century origins of Indian print culture

• Simon Fleming: Seeking subscribers: William McGibbon and his links with the Edinburgh Musical Society

• Nile Green: How print helped Asia’s self-discovery: European technologies in Asia’s communications revolution

• Martin Killeen: Baskerville Cambridge Bible women subscribers

• John Lavagnino: Paid on delivery: subscription publishing without pre-payment

• Dermot McGuinne: The printing of the annals of the four masters / a typographic consideration

• Martin Perkins: Publishing music by subscription as a promotional tool: the case of Jeremiah Clark, musician of Worcester and Birmingham

• Tony Quinn: Orford Ness, an Elizabethan map and a book to celebrate a Cambridge don

• Zsuzsa Torok: Periodical editors and their subscribers in the mid-nineteenth-century Kingdom of Hungary

At the end of the first day, there will be a visit to the Cadbury Research Library where we will view and discuss a selection of subscriber volume in the archives. On the second day there will be a visit to the Winterbourne Press, and the Typographic Library located at Winterbourne House. The conference coincides with Birmingham Heritage Week, when Winterbourne will be hosting the Birmingham Honey Show.