CAPVT VI · Chapter the Sixth

A List of Subscribers

ALBVM

A subscriber’s list named the people who had paid a printer in advance, on faith, before a single sheet was pulled,1 and their names stood at the front of the finished book because without them there would have been no book at all. We have already paid for the printing. No gift is expected — that sentence is plain on purpose, and we would rather you read it twice than read the three cards below as a bill in better clothes. Every decision we have made about the fifteenth of May has gone the same way, which is to say in favour of fitting one more person into the room rather than polishing what each person is handed once inside it: an open bar and a long afternoon on grass, bought at the price of a shorter list of refinements. We would genuinely rather have the guest than the gift. What the list below records, and the only subscription we are collecting, is the answer yes.

The Household

The ordinary furniture of a life kept in one house instead of two: pans, linens, the unglamorous objects that will outlast the wedding by several decades and never once be photographed. Registered, conventionally, at [REGISTRY NAME].

[REGISTRY NAME]

The Endowment

A chair endowed in the field of going somewhere and doing nothing, unrestricted, with no annual report to file and no committee to satisfy. The endowment funds a week in which neither of us grades, drafts, or answers anything.

[FUND LINK]

III

The Library

One of us writes the books and the other teaches from them, and the merger has left us with four copies of some titles and none of others. This fund buys the shelves first, in the sure knowledge of what happens to a shelf afterwards.

[LINK]

The Subscribers

As they are entered

[Subscriber]

[Subscriber, of Columbus]

[Subscriber, two copies]

[Subscriber, and lady]

[Subscriber]

[Subscriber, of Cincinnati]

[Subscriber, three copies]

[Subscriber, of the History Faculty]

[Subscriber]

[Subscriber, of Ohio]

[Subscriber, large paper]

[Subscriber, and party]

[Subscriber]

[Subscriber, two copies]

[Subscriber, of the bride’s side]

[Subscriber, in absentia]

[Subscriber]

[Subscriber, of the groom’s college]

¶ The list stands in brackets for now and fills in as replies arrive; every name you see here is a place held for somebody we have not heard from yet. The annotations are the honest kind — a subscriber who took two copies was recorded as having taken two copies2 — and we intend to keep the practice.

1 The groom, whose field is history, asks that the mechanism be stated correctly. A printer with no capital of his own took names and money first, went to press only once the subscriptions covered the paper, and bound the list of subscribers into the front matter, where it served at once as receipt, as advertisement, and as a quiet notice of who had backed the thing. Johnson financed his Dictionary this way, and Pope his Homer. The practice faded when publishers grew rich enough to carry the risk themselves, which is the usual way an interesting arrangement ends.

2 “Two copies” is a genuine annotation and a small boast: one to read and one to keep, or one to press upon a friend. Its modern equivalent is the relative who has read the sentence above about no gift being expected, has understood it perfectly, and will send something regardless. We have stopped arguing with her and recommend that you do not start.