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consulted. These records are not altogether satisfactory on the point of duration. The founding dates which they contain are sometimes inaccurate. They do not give the dates of suspension. And often the name of a periodical and data concerning it have been repeated in the annuals for one or two years after its publica- tion has ceased. But when no corrections from files or interested persons were obtainable, the first and last years of a publication's appearance in the directory lists have been taken for the statistics herein given. Andreas commented that for his History of Chi- cago (1884) it was occasionally impracticable to decide whether some of the publications announced "had assumed form or remained inchoate in the projectors " because the records in news- paper directories were inaccurate. He said it was impossible to get specific dates, the fire having destroyed printed evidence, and memories proving unreliable. Paul Selby, in preparing a section on " Defunct Newspapers and periodicals " for Moses and Kirk- land's History of Chicago (1895), drew heavily on Andreas for the early period, and then devoted only a column and a half to the periodicals after 1857, saying : " The records of subsequent years are even more imperfect than the preceding." In no history of Chicago has the ground been covered. The Inter-Ocean's His- tory of Chicago, Its Men and Institutions (1900), dismisses the subject with a brief paragraph stating that Chicago has made a number of attempts at high-grade literary magazines, but that "none has met with noteworthy success, probably owing to the fact that literature is not of a local character." A list of 107 newspapers and periodicals destroyed in the fire was compiled in 1872 by James W. Sheahan and George P. Upton, who com- plained that they had to depend solely on memory in getting it ready for their volume, The Great Conflagration: Chicago, Its Past, Present, and Future.
[To be continued]
