Most poetry pays poorly, and so most of the institutions that have developed to facilitate its production and distribution in the United States have served as patrons, insulating poets from the need to earn money directly from the publication of their poems. In the first third of the twentieth century this patronage was largely private, as wealthy individuals such as John Quinn and Scofield Thayer subsidized modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for both prestige and, ultimately, profit in the form of limited and signed editions that would in turn enable the emergence of a collector’s market. Inherited wealth also formed the basis of modernist publishing, as the “new breed” of American publishers such as Horace Liveright and James Laughlin used family funds to finance their ventures, again frequently producing limited editions that would ultimately accrue value in the collector’s market even as they functioned as prestigious loss leaders in the mainstream literary marketplace.