The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia announces the electronic publication of two scholarly works, Attributions of Authorship in the GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, 1731-1868: An Electronic Union List, and Attributions of Authorship in the EUROPEAN MAGAZINE, 1782-1826. These fully searchable resources created by Emily Lorraine de Montluzin provide unprecedented access to the contents of two of the most important and wide-ranging English periodicals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Carefully designed and meticulously documented, these databases also serve as paradigms for future electronic research in bibliography. The Bibliographical Society of UVa is delighted to be the first in the family of international bibliographical societies to publish original research in an electronic environment.

The publications are available without charge to users world-wide through the Society's website.

Attributions of Authorship in the GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, 1731-1868: An Electronic Union List, by Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, is a fully searchable database that provides attributions for over 25,000 anonymous contributions in the periodical.

From its beginning in 1731 until 1856, when its longtime editor John Nichols relinquished ownership, the Gentleman's Magazine was one of the most influential periodicals in England. Because many of the contributions in this reservoir of contemporary news and culture were anonymous or signed in a way that obscured authorship, numerous attempts have been made to provide reliable attributions. The current publication brings together the existing identifications and adds a major new trove.

The Union List encompasses finds from three separate earlier projects and provides thousands of new attributions of authorship together with an expanded and revised introduction. The largest component (originally published in 1999) is a recasting of materials in James M. Kuist's The Nichols File of the GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, which on its print publication in 1982 made available some 14,000 attributions identified by members of the Nichols family in a staff copy of the periodical. Through additional research, whose results first appeared in six articles in Studies in Bibliography, vols. 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, and 50, de Montluzin added 4,000 more attributions to Kuist's list, publishing those authorial identifications in an electronic database in 1996. Over the years many other scholars have made attributions of authorship, and de Montluzin culled some 1,850 of those finds from about five dozen separate publications, publishing them in an electronic database in 1997. Attributions of Authorship in the GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, 1731-1868: An Electronic Union List consists of a thorough revision and integration of those three earlier databases and adds over 5,000 finds to the total. As a result, 25,585 attributions across 137 years of the magazine's life are now available in a single, searchable database.

Attributions of Authorship in the GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, 1731-1868: An Electronic Union List is searchable by keyword, volume number, page number, date range, title, author, and pseudonym. Finds are listed in Attributions by Volume and are cross-listed in a Contributor Index, both of which are browsable, and are accompanied by browsable indices of pseudonyms and signatory initials used by the Gentleman's Magazine's contributors. In an expanded introductory essay the author describes her methodology for ascribing authorship and provides further information about features of the database.

Attributions of Authorship in the EUROPEAN MAGAZINE, 1782-1826, is a fully searchable database listing all known attributions of authorship for anonymous, pseudonymous, or incompletely attributed articles, letters, reviews, and poems appearing in the European Magazine from its first monthly number in 1782 to its cessation in 1826. Like its contemporary the Gentleman's Magazine, the European Magazine printed articles and letters concerning literature, antiquarian matters, theology, science, biography, and current news, and included monthly department for book reviews, poetry, parliamentary reporting, and theater. Many of these articles were printed anonymously or bore only initials to designate authorship. Professor de Montluzin has used both contemporary and internal evidence to determine the authorship of a substantial proportion of the items appearing in the European Magazine's 50,000 pages.

Attributions of Authorship in the EUROPEAN MAGAZINE assembles the names of 160 men and women who contributed material to the European Magazine during its forty-four year history Among these newly identified contributors are the literary critics George Steevens and Isaac Reed, musician Charles Burney, botanist Richard Pulteney, astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, and Orientalist Sir William Jones. Among the women on the list are the Della Cruscan poet Hannah Cowley, Eliza Gilding Turner, Mary ("Perdita") Robinson, and the prolific writer of verse and tales Anna Jane Vardill. Several American contributors appear: Washington Irving; the physician Joseph Brown Ladd; the Rev. Timothy Dwight; Congregationalist divine and president of Yale College; the Rev. John Vardill, titular professor of natural law at King's College (later Columbia University) and Loyalist spy; and William Franklin, natural son of Benjamin Franklin and last royal governor of New Jersey. Among the contributors were a number whose literary reputations long remained high, most notably Irving, Thomas Percy, Thomas Campbell, Isaac D'Israeli, Sir Walter Scott, and William Hazlitt.

Attributions of Authorship in the EUROPEAN MAGAZINE is searchable by keyword, volume number, page number, date range, title, author, and pseudonym. The 2074 attributions are cross-listed in a Chronological Listing and a Synopsis by Contributor, both of which are fully browseable. In an introductory essay the author describes her methodology for ascribing authorship and provides further information about features of the database.

Emily Lorraine de Montluzin is Professor of History at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina