College and Research Libraries


The United States Government As Pub-
lisher. LeRoy Charles Merritt. The 
University of Chicago Press, I 943· 
I 79P, tables and figures. (University 
of Chicago Studies in Library Science.) 

T HE MAGNITUDE of the publishing ac-tivities of the United States govern-
ment is vaguely realized even by those 
who check or handle government publica-
tions continually. The general public has 
scant knowledge of the volume or the kinds 
of material the government publishes.· 
The frequent user of certain specific pub-
lications is usually unaware of the wealth 
and variety of material outside his own 
field of interest. He would doubtless be 
startled to learn from this book that in 
the first forty years ( I 86o- I goo) of the 
establishment of the Government Printing 
Office twelve thousand printed documents 
were produced annually and that in the 
second forty years the number was nearly 
doubled with a further augmentation of 
some ten thousand publications issued by 
the various governmental agencies. 

In this study Mr. Merritt has suc-
ceeded in bringing the general picture of 
the federal government as publisher into 
focus, thereby making possible a clear-cut, 
over-all view of the wealth and variety of 
its publications. No such veridical view 
has heretofore been given in any study 
known to the reviewer. For this reason . 
and because of the high quality of the 
workmanship evident throughout the 
study, the good organization and the clar-
ity of its reporting, The United States 
Government As Publisher is a contribu-
tion of real value to everyone interested 
in federal documents. 

In the words of the author the purpose 
of the study has been "to discover the 
scope of the subject content of the present 
output of the publishing offices of the 

SEPTEMBER, 1943 

United States government and to trace 
the trend of subject emphasis in govern-
ment publications since the turn of the 
century." 1 

The main data for the study are a 
sampling of nearly 70o,ooo separate, indi-
vidual print~d and processed documents 
published since Igoo as recorded in The 
United States Government Publications 
Monthly Catalog, better known as the 
Monthly Catalog. The publications in 
the sampling are analyzed by issuing office, 
by function, and by subject. The analyses 
are based on the assumption that entries of 
publications in one issue of the Monthly 
Catalog, the October number for each of 
the nine years selected for study, is repre-
sentative of the entire year. A detailed 
analysis by issuing office, function, and 
subject is also made for the publications 
listed in the January, April, July, and 
October numbers of the Monthly Catalog 
for the year I 939· The analyses are pre-
ceded in the study by a brief review of 
the development of the government's print-
ing and publishing practices throughout 
its history with special attention to the 
expenditures involved. 

Since the Government Printing Office 
is essentially a printing, not a publishing, 
ofJice, the first analysis by department or 
issuing office as publisher was necessary. 
Each of the ten executive departments, 
the legislative branch, the judicial branch, 
and the independent establishments as one 
single unit, were considered as thirteen 
different publishers. In this analysis by 
"publishing office" it is possible to trace 
the trend of document production in each 
office through the forty years covered by 
the study, to compare their expenditures 
for printing and their expenditures for 

1 Merritt, LeRoy Charles. The United States Gov-
ernment as Publisher. University of Chicago Press, 
1943, P- 2. 

325 



all other purposes during the same years, 
and to see the relationship between totar 
expenditures for printing and the number 
of documents produced. 

The analysis reveals that, as a group, 
the independent establishments have con-
sistently led all other "publishing offices" 
since I 93 I in number of publications and 
in I 939 were responsible for one fourth 
of all documents published for the year, 
with I 6 per cent of their publications 
processed. The author refers several 
times in the study to another fact revealed 
in this analysis that, contrary to a popular 
notion, the Department of Agriculture is 
not the most prolific of all government 
publishers. It is surpassed by the De-
partment of Commerce as well as by the 
independent institutions and the legislative 
branch. This analysis also shows the 
comparatively close relationship between 
expenditures for printing and volume of 
publications. The general trend over the 
forty-year period has been upward for 
both, although in general the increase in 
expenditures for printing and processing 
government publications has not kept pace 
with the corresponding increase in operat-
ing expenditures for the government over 
the same period. The expenditures for 
printing dropped from nearly I per cent of 
operating expenses in I goo to about one 
fourth of I per cent in I 940. 

In the functional analysis documents 
are "considered as instruments that fur-
ther or assist a certain governmental 
process. Besides being published by a 
certain agency about a certain subject, 
documents are issued for a certain pur-
pose."2 These purposes are: legislative, 
administrative, reportorial, service, re-
search, and informational. According to 
the analysis, more documents were pub-

2 Ibid., p. Iss. 

lished in the interest of the service func-
tion-the conveying of useful information 
to special groups and individual members 
of the public-than for any other of these 
six purposes. More than a third of all 
documents published in I 939 were de-
voted to this service, two thirds of them 
being issued in processed form. Reference 
librarians will certainly agree with the 
author's conclusion that "the most im-
portant function of United States govern-
ment publications is the dissemination of 
useful general and statistical informa-
tion."3 

The problem of processed documents 
receives merited attention throughout the 
study. The functional analysis reveals 
that a large percentage of the service 
function group and the administrative 
function group of publications are proc-
essed. This tends to bear out the con-
tention of the departments that processing 
is used chiefly "for administrative and 
statistical purposes-for material that 
must be produced in a hurry and that 
does not appear to merit the permanency 
and cost of ordinary printing."4 

The subject analysis may, at first, be 
disappointing to those who expect to find a 
classification of government publications by 
the usual small topics. To one interested 
in the teaching of federal government 
publications, however, the classification 
scheme as presented in Table I suggests 
a most promising outline for their study 
by subject. The classification used is one 
which has been developed especially for 
the documents listed in the Monthly 
Catalog. It has been worked out em-
pirically with definitions formulated in 
realistic terms. In it thirty-two broad 
subjects are grouped into seven general 
fields, one being a necessary miscellaneous 

3 Ibid. 
4 Ibid., p. II6·I7. 

326 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



group to include five important subjects 
which are not classifiable elsewhere in the 
scheme. These seven general fields are 
(in the order in which the analysis shows 
the most documents were published) : 
basic. activities of government, business, 
public utilities, public welfare, agriculture, 
miscellaneous (natural sciences, technol-
ogy and engineering, humanities and social 
sciences, education, libraries), public 
works. It should afford considerable 
satisfaction to all of us in these times to 
learn that, measured in terms of the num-
ber of publications issued, our government 
is still concerned first of all with its basic 
activities; that is, . with general adminis-
tration, including financial and personnel 
administration, with national defense, and 
with foreign affairs just as it has been for 
the past forty years. Significant also is 
the fact, brought out in this subject analy-
sis, that the second most important concern 
of the government is the collection and 
dissemination of information concerning 
the business activities of the United States, 
a fact long known to the business librarian. 

A publisher may produce in large quan-
tity fine and useful publications, but unless 

SEPTEMBER~ 1943 

these reach those for whom intended or 
those to whom they will prove useful the 
publishing effort may well be a failure. 
The satisfactory distribution of federal 
government publications is one of the most 
serious problems which confronts the 
United States government as publisher. 
A critical description of the present meth-
ods of distribution is presented at the end 
of the study and certain recommendations 
for revision of these methods are sug-
gested. This chapter is interesting, 
chiefly in that it rounds out the picture 
of the government as publisher. 

Certain procedures in the study might 
be questioned, such as the use only of the 
October issues of the Monthly Catalog 
in making the sampling, or the grouping 
of forty-three different independent estab-
lishments into one "publishing office" but 
this questioning involves only minor points. 
It does not reflect on the excellence of the 
study nor on its success in bringing into 
focus a complete, general picture of the 
United States as publisher.-Anne M. 
Boyd~ Associate Professor of Library 
Science~ University of Illinois Library 
School~ Urbana. 

327