Subscriber Maps, Redux

You may recall some previous posts relating to a little side project I'd been mucking about with, the mapping of book subscription lists (it started with Thomas Prince's Chronological History of New England and then I also mapped the subscribers to Audubon's Birds of America).

This summer in the Rare Book School collections I found another neat subscriber list, this one in the first American edition of Laurence Sterne's works, published at Philadelphia in 1774. This list offered a good opportunity to try out geocommons, which offers some different ways to display map data than Google Maps does.

For the Prince map (detailed at left), I plotted each subscriber individually, and keyed the pin color to the number of copies ordered (blue for one, red for two, green for three, yellow for six, &c.). This method worked just fine, although Boston (with 619 of the 1,421 total copies subscribed for) looks very jumbled.

In the Audubon map, since subscribing for just one copy was the norm, I keyed the pin colors instead to the subscriber type: government entities, educational institutions, libraries, learned societies, individuals, and royal families. Again, this worked just fine, and I think both maps make for useful visualizations of the subscription lists.

When I started working through the list of Sterne subscribers, I realized a couple things: first, I didn't want to try and figure out precise locations for each subscriber within cities, as that had proven with Prince and Audubon to consume a bit (hem hem) more time than I wanted to expend. And just plonking a whole bunch of points down in the middle of Philadelphia willy-nilly didn't really appeal to me either. So I decided to work with geocommons and see if I could come up with a more useful visualization method.

The resulting map is here (with a detail at left). This time, I keyed the pin sizes to the number of subscriptions ordered from each location, and adjusted the size of the marker accordingly. So here, Philadelphia (with 284 copies subscribed for) immediately jumps out as the key location. [NB: That said, because geocommons allows only a limited number of marker-sizes, it's still difficult to get a sense of just how dominant Philadelphia is: the next location, Norfolk, VA, had just 84 copies subscribed for].

The Sterne map is notable for its geographic range, with subscribers from New Brunswick to Grenada (there's a whole other project!).

Having done it once, it was simply a matter of running some numbers to make geocommons-style weighted maps for the Prince and Audubon lists, so I did that too: again with the limited number of marker-sizes the Prince map doesn't quite capture the sheer dominance of Boston (619 copies subscribed for, with the next highest being Charlestown at 69, followed by Harvard College at 34).

The Audubon map works well, though, since there are fewer locations and there's not quite such a single overwhelming one (London with 21, followed by New York at 18, Boston at 16 and Paris at 11).

So, overall, another useful way to visualize these subscription lists and learn a bit more from them.

Mapping Audubon's Subscribers

Since I enjoyed my first foray into mapping subscriber lists, I decided I'd have another go ... and since a copy of Audubon's Birds of America is coming up for sale later this week, that was a natural choice.

Check out the map here.

I opted to use the "final list of subscribers" - that is, the list Audubon included in the last volume of his Ornithological Biography (Edinburgh, 1839). Some others had subscribed for earlier parts of the work and are not included here; nor are those subscribers who purchased full sets following publication. The final list is separated by American subscribers (82) and European subscribers (78, since one is listed twice), for a total of 160.

For my previous map, I used different color pins to indicate the number of copies subscribed for; that wouldn't have worked in this case since most subscribers took only a single copy*, so I used the pin-colors instead to indicate the subscriber category: government body, college or university, library, learned society or museum, individual, or a royal family.

Using Waldemar Fries' The Double Elephant Folio (originally published in 1973, and reissued by Zenaida Publishing in 2006 with updates by Susanne M. Low), I was also able to track the current whereabouts of the copies where that information is known.

Notably, just twelve copies of the Birds of America appear to remain with their original owner-subscribers (others, as I mentioned above, remain with their original purchasers who were not subscribers). They are:

- Library of Congress

- State Library of Massachusetts (2010 article)

- Boston Athenaeum

- Harvard University

- American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia

- Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia

- Columbia University

- Cambridge University Library

- Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

- Christ Church Library, Oxford

- Radcliffe Science Library, Oxford

- Institute de France, Paris

As with the previous map, in many cases I didn't have precise addresses for the subscribers, so the pin-locations are approximate. If anyone has more specific information on the addresses, or other corrections, &c., I'll be more than happy to update the map. [Update: using digitized city directories, I have found reasonably good address information for most of the subscribers now] And for the full stories of these subscribers and the copies' journeys over time, do consult Fries' wonderful book.

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* The French Interior Ministry did request six copies, but they only appear to have received six copies of the first volume.

Mapping Subscriber Lists: Examples and Potential

Back in October (in fact two months ago today), Simran Thadani tweeted¹ a preliminary Google Map she'd created of some of the subscribers to one of George Bickham's books (Penmanship in its Utmost Beauty and Extent, 1731). I thought it was a brilliant idea, and decided to try one of my own.

I've long been fascinated by the subscriber list in Thomas Prince's 1736 A Chronological History of New-England In the Form of Annals² (which you can read online, via the Internet Archive). The list, which takes up a full twenty pages in the book, comprises some 736 names, including 28 who had died between the time they subscribed and when the book was published.³ An 1852 New England Historical & Genealogical Register article reprinting the list noted that the subscribers "may be justly regarded as the principal Literati of New England, who flourished about the beginning of the last century."

Starting with the list, off I went; you can see the resulting map here.⁴ The different pin colors represent the number of copies subscribed for: of those subscribing for more than a single copy, 87 took six copies, 57 took two, 24 took three, 11 took twelve, 3 took four, and 1 subscriber requested a whopping twenty-four copies.⁵ In most cases the subscriber's town was also listed; in almost all cases where the town wasn't listed the subscriber proved to be from Boston.

I attempted to locate Boston subscribers within the city using newspaper databases and other sources (an overlay of the 1722 Bonner map also proved very useful); for those not yet located to a specific street I've placed the pins on Boston Common for now. When I get a chance, I'll spend some time with the Thwing Index of early Boston residents, and if readers can more precisely locate any of the subscribers I'll be more than happy to update the map.

The map probably would have been quite enough, but as I mapped I began adding short annotations for each subscriber. Beginning in 1852 and for several decades thereafter, the NEHGR printed a sporadic series of "Brief Memoirs and Notices of Prince's Subscribers," and I started using these and another partial set of annotations from 1910. I quickly realized that the NEHGR annotations were too idiosyncratic to be useful, and the 1910 annotations were frequently simply wrong on the identifications or the facts. At that point I probably ought to have just stuck with the map, but in for a penny, in for a pound, right?

For each of the subscribers I could identify, I included what information I could find on their birth and death dates, education, occupation, family connections, &c.⁶ The Colonial Collegians database (accessed through NEHGS) proved extremely useful, since a significant number of the subscribers were Harvard graduates (a much smaller number graduated from Yale). I also may go through the records of extant copies of the book and see how many I can trace back to original subscribers, so that information can be added as well.

As I worked, I was thinking about the possibilities of all this, and I began to imagine a digital Atlas of Subscription Printing, combining GIS visualizations of a body of subscription lists with a layered database allowing filtering by demographic factors, publication data (location, date, &c.) occupation, education level, subscriptions to other books, relationships between subscribers and between subscribers and authors, &c. Wouldn't that be something?!

Comments, feedback, suggestions, thoughts always appreciated!

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¹ Alas, I cannot link to the tweet, since it is locked.

² Full title: "A Chronological History of New-England In the Form of Annals: Being a summary and exact Account of the most material Transactions and Occurrences relating to this country, in the Order of Time wherein they happened, from the Discovery by Capt. Gosnold in 1602, to the Arrival of Governor Belcher, in 1730. With an Introduction, Containing a brief Epitome of the most remarkable Transactions and Events Abroad, from the Creation: Including the connected Line of Time, the Succession of Patriarchs and Sovereigns of the most famous Kingdoms & Empires, the gradual Discoveries of America, and the Progress of the Reformation to the Discovery of New-England."

³ On the final page of the subscription list is the notice "Our Subscription being begun in 1728, and several of the Subscribers being since deceased, who are marked with a [*] This may notify the Relatives of such deceased Persons, that if they incline to take up the Books subscribed for, they may do it, provided they come or send for them in a short time."

⁴ Google Maps annoyingly doesn't allow maps with more than 200 points to be displayed on a single page, so the regular view of the map (here) shows four pages and won't display all the points at once. If anybody knows a workaround for this, I'd be more than a little glad to know of it.

⁵ Many of the multi-copy subscriptions were probably for resale. The 24-copy subscriber was Jonathan Whitney of Wrentham, MA. Just one of the subscribers was a woman, Lydia Draper of Boston (for two copies); she was the widow of printer Richard Draper.

⁶ I'm sure I made mistakes, and there are still a few subscribers I didn't identify conclusively. If you've got information, please do send it along, I'd love to include it.