As it was, Creech made an agreement which left Burns to bear all the immediate risks and perhaps to receive a modest immediate profit, but which reserved the long-term earnings for the publisher alone. As was often the case with books published by subscription, the man whose name appeared on the title-page was not the publisher in the modern sense, but merely the author’s agent. He provided the facilities for collecting the subscriptions and distributing the books, but took none of the financial responsibility. The author received the entire payment for the subscribers’ copies, but out of these receipts had to pay the printer, the bookbinder, and also, presumably, the transportation charges on copies delivered out-of-town. Furthermore, the agents who distributed the books naturally expected to be paid. Hence Burns, wherever possible, enlisted his friends for this service--Alexander Pattison at Paisley, for instance, and Robert Muir at Kilmarnock--and when that was not feasible still sought to avoid the regular booksellers because they took ‘no less than the unconscionable, Jewish tax of 25 p^r Cent. by way of agency’. The price to subscribers was set at the modest sum of five shillings, and close to three thousand subscriptions were obtained. Burns objected to printing the names of the subscribers--quite naturally, for the thirty-eight pages meant money out of his pocket merely to gratify the vanity of people yearning to see their names in print as patrons of literature--but was overborne by some friends whom he did not ‘chuse to thwart’. Professor Snyder calculates Burns’s utmost possible gross receipts from the subscription at £750. But after all charges were paid the net profit cannot have been more than half that sum. He told Mrs. Dunlop that he cleared about £540, but there, as in a similar statement to John Moore, he was reckoning in Creech’s payment of 100 guineas for the copyright.