A List of Treasury Reports and Circulars

A List of Treasury Reports and Circulars is a bibliographical work by Paul Leicester Ford (1865-1902), the American bibliographer, historian, novelist, and editor whose short but extraordinarily productive career produced major scholarly contributions across several fields before his murder by his brother in 1902 at the age of thirty-seven.

Ford was born into a wealthy Brooklyn family and developed serious bibliographical interests in his teens. He produced his first published bibliographical work at fourteen. His career across the following two decades included substantial scholarly editing of Thomas Jefferson’s writings, of the Federalist Papers, and of various other early American historical documents. He also produced popular fiction, including the bestseller The Honorable Peter Stirling of 1894, which influenced the young Theodore Roosevelt’s political fiction and which sold widely across the 1890s and early 1900s.

The Treasury Reports bibliographical work belongs to Ford’s serious scholarly side. American federal government publications had grown enormously across the nineteenth century, with the various executive departments producing reports, circulars, and other documents in quantities that even Library of Congress had difficulty cataloging. Bibliographical guides like Ford’s allowed serious researchers in American economic and political history to locate the specific Treasury documents relevant to their work.

The Treasury Department had been one of the most active publishing federal agencies since the founding of the republic. Reports of the Secretary of the Treasury, circular instructions to customs collectors, tariff schedules, monetary reports, and various other documents accumulated across the nineteenth century into a substantial body of material. Ford’s bibliography organized this material in a form that scholars could actually use.

The book is a reference work rather than a reading book. It is of interest now primarily to specialists in nineteenth-century American economic history and to historians of federal government documentation. It pairs with Ford’s other bibliographical and editorial work, particularly his ten-volume edition of Jefferson and his various editions of early American historical sources. The full Ford bibliography list runs to dozens of titles produced in his short career.