Two precursors to subscription publishing come together in nineteenth century America. The first, chapbooks, were cheaply printed works with crude images and paper covers sold door to door. The second were works written by authors for an economically privileged audience. Well-to-do patrons, to whom such works might be dedicated, or subscribers who paid in advance for the opportunity to acquire a work: such an audience was able to make a publisher's investment secure even before a book was printed and sold.
Subscription publishing became an accepted method of publication during the seventeenth century. As a way of acknowledging subscribers, authors included printed lists of subscribers in the work, often at the beginning, in place of or in addition to a dedication. The works typically sold by subscription in the seventeenth century were atlases, geographies, and histories, especially Bible histories. But important works of English literature were also published in this manner. Among them was, for example, the first illustrated edition of Milton's Paradise Lost, published by the great London publisher, Jacob Tonson in 1688. Its subscriber list names more than five hundred prominent individuals.
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, a variety of abuses had led to decline in the subscription method of publishing in England. During the nineteenth century, the old forms of subscription publishing gave way in America to new a form, which joined together the roles of publisher and peddler.