publishers. Mail failures are common, and unceasing vigilance is
the price that must be paid for completeness. The same check-list, by
other spaces, should show the time of expiration of subscriptions, and
the price paid per year. And where a large number of periodicals are
received, covering many parts of the country, they should be listed, not
only by an alphabet of titles, but by another alphabet of places where
published, as well.

If a new library is to be formed, having no sets of periodicals on which
to build, effort should be made to secure full sets from the beginning of
as many of the prominent magazines and reviews, American and foreign, as
the funds will permit. It is expedient to wait a little, rather than to
take up with incomplete sets, as full ones are pretty sure to turn up,
and competition between the many dealers should bring down prices to a
fair medium. In fact, many old sets of magazines are offered surprisingly
cheap, and usually well-bound. But vigilant care must be exercised to
secure perfect sets, as numbers are often mutilated, or deficient in some
pages or illustrations. This object can only be secured by collation of
every volume, page by page, with due attention to the list of
illustrations, if any are published.

In the absence of British bibliographical enterprise (a want much to be
deplored) it has fallen to the lot of American librarians to produce the
only general index of subjects to English periodical literature which
exists. Poole's Index to Periodical Literature is called by the name of
its senior editor, the late Dr. Wm. F. Poole, and was contributed to by
many librarians on a cooeperative division of labor, in indexing, under
direction of Mr. Wm. I. Fletcher, librarian of Amherst College. This
index to leading periodicals is literally invaluable, and indispensable
as an aid to research. Its first volume indexes in one alphabet the
periodicals embraced, from their first issues up to 1882. The second
volume runs from 1882 to 1887, and the third covers the period from 1887
to 1891, while a fourth volume indexes the periodicals from 1892 to 1896,
inclusive. For 1897, and each year after, an annual index to the
publications of the year is issued.

Besides this, the _Review of Reviews_ publishes monthly an index to one
month's leading periodicals, and also an annual index, very full, in a
single alphabet. And the "Cumulative Index," issued both monthly and
quarterly, by W. H. Brett,