The investigator is moreover impeded in his progress by lack of definite and trustworthy information about these publications. There is no complete list of the American magazines during the years under discussion, although work has been done on the period to the end of 1800. Paul Leicester Ford published a _Check-list of American magazines printed in the eighteenth century_ (1889, Brooklyn, N. Y.). This was an attempt to list all publications referred to by any writer, whether accessible or not. The present investigation, however, has brought to light thirty-five or forty volumes of magazines (including twenty new titles), evidently unknown to Ford, not to speak of several newspapers of more or less literary value; but the latter seem to have been omitted intentionally from the _Check-list_. Even the magazines of Philadelphia, the literary center of the country during the eighteenth century, have not been listed. "A complete list of the Philadelphia magazines is impossible. Many of them have disappeared and left not a rack behind. The special student of Pennsylvania history will detect some omissions in these pages, for all that has here been done has been done at first hand, and where a magazine was inaccessible to me, I have not attempted to see it through the eyes of a more fortunate investigator."[14] What is here said of Philadelphia is equally true of Boston, New York, Baltimore and the other centers of literary activity of a century ago. [Footnote 14: Albert H. Smyth, _The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors_, 1741-1850. Philadelphia, Robert M. Lindsay, 1892. Preface, p. 5.] In spite of the difficulties just mentioned it has been possible, after an extended search, to find enough volumes of the magazines to form an almost complete list for the period in question. What omissions there may be are, for the most part, obscure and unimportant publications, which failed to attract enough attention to be included in the large collections of this class of literature. One condition favored the preservation of the American magazines; there were a few institutions, like the Philadelphia Library Company, the American Philosophical Society, and others, which were in existence during the period when most of these publications were issued. It has been possible for them to amass a fairly representative collection of contemporaneous literature. On the other hand, more recent institutions, like the Boston Public Library or the Library of Congress, have displayed such industry in collecting, that they now have splendid lists of these early periodicals.