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.
The plan of the present investigation has been, therefore, to visit those libraries where large numbers of the books needed are located and thus, by combining the material secured in the different places, to approach as near as possible to completeness. One library fills out the gaps of another and it often happens that, in order to see the entire set of a magazine, it is necessary to visit three or four libraries. A record has been kept as to where the individual volumes are, but as useful as this information might be for those working in the same or in a kindred field it has been found too complex to be indicated in the list of magazines given in Part V.[15] The material here included is based on a personal examination of about three hundred volumes representing one hundred and twenty-eight different magazines.