(Witness: Hill.) Mr. HILL. By the time it reaches me and gets through my hands the 30 will be reduced to 5, 6, 7, or 8 cases. The CHAIRMAN. That is not the question at all. The question is, How many errors have you known that first reader to find in a bulletin that came from some bureau in the Department of Agriculture? Have you known him to find 10, or 30, or 40, or 50, or how many? Mr. HILL. Very rarely more than 7 or 8; sometimes 3 or 4. The CHAIRMAN. Do you sometimes find 30? Mr. HILL. I sometimes find 30 references; I very seldom have found 30. If I found 30 errors it would probably result in a report adverse to the publication of the bulletin altogether. The CHAIRMAN. I do not mean errors in the sense of their being wrong; I mean in the sense of alterations-that is, you gave an illustration a few minutes ago of your first reader's finding, say, 30 things that he would query. Mr. HILL. That he would query; yes. The CHAIRMAN. Yes; that he would query. Now, what I want to know is how many of those do they frequently find in the bulletins. that come into your division from these various bureaus? Mr. HILL. They will frequently find occasion to query a score of the statements, perhaps. The CHAIRMAN. Yes. Now, at any stage of your reading do you go to the substance, or only to the form? Mr. HILL. We go to the form of all of it and to the substance of that part of it which relates to things not directly technical or scientific. What is technical and scientific we leave to the chief of the bureau and his editor, his bureau editor. We take it that they have the thing scientifically as they want it, but we go to the form of that part and of the entire bulletin. The CHAIRMAN. How often do you have a bulletin that you can allow to go through and that your editors allow to go through without revision or alteration? Does that ever happen? Mr. HILL. Yes, sir. The CHAIRMAN. About how often, would you say, are the articles that you get from these bureaus accurate and complete enough so that they can go right through without any change? Mr. HILL. Perhaps 40 per cent of them. The CHAIRMAN. That gives us a very good idea. So that there is 40 per cent of the material that your first reader passes through as to accuracy. For Mr. HILL. I will not say that the first reader passes it through, sir; because his instructions are to call my attention to matters of a certain description whether they go through or not. instance, if any reference is made to the policy of the Department, he calls my attention to it whether it is correct or otherwise. The CHAIRMAN. I suppose it is a fact that there are bulletins that do not make any reference to the policy of the Department? Mr. HILL. Yes, sir; there are some of them. The CHAIRMAN. Your idea is that about 40 per cent of all the bulletins are passed by the first reader without suggesting any alterations? Mr. HILL. Without suggesting alterations; yes, sir. 23848-07- -32 (Witness: Hill.) The CHAIRMAN. Yes. So that as to 40 per cent of the bulletins you really only get the judgment of, say, an editorial clerk or an assistant editor. If matter has gone out in those 40 that really comes within this category, you would not know it, except as you rely on the judgment of this associate editor? Mr. HILL. I trust to their judgment to call my attention to anything I ought to see. The CHAIRMAN. Yes; but if nothing appeals to him, he passes it by? Mr. HILL. He passes it by. The CHAIRMAN. And 40 per cent of it goes by without any suggestion of alteration? Mr. HILL. Yes. I think it is due to these gentlemen, in that connection, to say that I do not think that in the sixteen or seventeen years I have been there, there have been more than half a dozen cases where something has gotten by that ought not to have gotten by. The CHAIRMAN. Oh, I assume that they are competent men. The CHAIRMAN. This does not militate against their efficiency at all. I simply want to get the facts. Mr. HILL. I simply did not want to go on record without saying a word for them. The CHAIRMAN. Oh, that is proper. Mr. HILL. Take such a question, for instance, as advertising, Mr. Chairman. Without any thought of doing anything improper, an author will bring in an advertisement of some machine, some implement, some process, which it is not the policy of the Department to permit in a publication of the Government, paid for with the public funds, and distributed under a frank. That is such a thing as will occasionally slip through to our office. The CHAIRMAN. You mean by "advertisement" that you do not care to have anything go out in a bulletin that directs attention to a specific thing that somebody manufactures? Mr. HILL. Exactly. Occasionally it is unavoidable; but generally we do not put in the name of the manufacturer and the place where it is manufactured. The CHAIRMAN. You describe it as a process, and not as a particular article? Mr. HILL. Not in the concrete. Then, my men are especially well informed in the matter of the making of books. The CHAIRMAN. What do you mean by that-binding them up? Mr. HILL. In the question of binding and in the question of preparing matter for the printer. When I first went there, I found that all of our matter, on its arrival at the Public Printer's, was turned into the proof-reading room and prepared for the compositors. Now we do all that. We save all that in my office, because the men I employ are sufficiently experienced in that line to save that work, and when the copy goes to the printer it is fit to be put into "takes" and distributed to the different compositors directly. The CHAIRMAN. Yes; it is completed copy? Mr. HILL. It is completed copy, prepared in every respect, so that (Witness: Hill.) the last "take" will be set in the same style as the first "take," without any further instructions. That was not the case when I first took hold. The CHAIRMAN. What did they do? Have somebody else do that work? Mr. HILL. That was done in the Government Printing Office, and that frequently led to consultations, going back and forth. I think we have saved a great deal of work by having that all done by us. We know the Public Printer's style; we know all the things that he regards as essential, and within those limits we use our own discretion as to style and uniformity. The CHAIRMAN. Do you read proof in your division? Mr. HILL. We read the proof; yes. We read the proof once, but not by copy. It is read by copy at the Public Printer's. The CHAIRMAN. Do you read a proof that is struck off by the Printing Office? Mr. HILL. Yes. The CHAIRMAN. Does it come back to you for that purpose? The CHAIRMAN. That is, the manuscript goes down to the Printing Office, it is set up, and an impression or two taken, as the case may be? Mr. HILL. Yes. The CHAIRMAN. And that proof impression comes back to your of fice, and you take that with the original manuscript and read the proof and make the necessary printer's corrections? Mr. HILL. We do not read it by copy, as I say. We do not have a copyholder, one man holding a manuscript and the other man reading proof. That is done at the Public Printer's, and we trust to them for that. But the copy comes back, and we generally send the copy and one of these proofs to the author, while we read the other proof. The CHAIRMAN. That is what you call, I suppose, the "final revise?" Mr. HILL. We make a final revise; yes, sir. The CHAIRMAN. That is what you get. Mr. HILL. And then the author almost always finds something that he wants to alter. That is one of the things that I am there for-to keep a man from editing his stuff after he gets it in the proof, because that is very expensive work, and we check that in every way. Still, there will occasionally be some little corrections that are necessary, and they come to us, and we transfer them to our proof and send it back to the Public Printer and retain the author's proof as evidence of the changes that he requested. The CHAIRMAN. Has there been any increase in the personnel of your office during the last ten years? Mr. HILL. Yes, sir. Do you mean the editorial force strictly? The CHAIRMAN. No; I mean the personnel of the whole Bureau. Mr. HILL. Yes, sir; there has been considerable increase. The CHAIRMAN. What is the kind of work which has occasioned the increase? Mr. HILL. The distribution of documents has doubled in the last ten years. (Witness: Hill.) The CHAIRMAN. What sort of work is done in your Bureau, except this editorial and supervisory work, which in one way covers all the publications? What other work do you do? Mr. HILL. We have a division of illustrations, which is a subdivision or a section, I suppose you would call it, of our division. The CHAIRMAN. What is the character of that division? What sort of work do they do? Do they make original pictures? Mr. HILL. They have draftsmen, and make original pictures, make copies, and do the photographing work, of which we do a very large amount. The CHAIRMAN. It has been suggested that quite a good many of the Government publications are more than profusely illustrated; that some cuts are practically duplicates of others, and that some cuts are published in the books that really do not tend to illuminate the text, and sometimes present a common subject with which everybody must be entirely familiar. Who has the power, down there in your Bureau, to bring these illustrations right down to "hard pan," so that no more of them are published than are really necessary? The Mr. HILL. I do. That is part of my business. The tendency is just as you relate. The tendency of an author is generally to overillustrate, and there is a "hetcheling" process that goes on. Bureau editors and the chiefs generally throw out some of the illustrations, and they have to come to me with a letter, which we require the chief to sign, stating that he has personally looked into these illustrations and believes them to be necessary to the proper apprehension of the text by the reader. But even then we go over them, and very frequently send them back to him and ask him to take out three or four more those that do not seem to us to be necessary. The CHAIRMAN. Do the men that prepare these articles have unlimited authority and discretion to skirmish around and get illustrations that seem to them to be wise and necessary and practical, without limit except their own discretion, to employ a draftsman to do this work, and then perhaps get an accumulation of illustrations, so that you have to weed out a pretty good percentage of the illustrations thus obtained? Mr. HILL. A great many of them are illustrations that are needed in their work. The CHAIRMAN. But I am not discussing that question. The CHAIRMAN. Do these men that do the original work, that write the original articles, giving the results of the scientific investigation, have unlimited authority to get up such illustrations as they think they want? Mr. HILL. You can not call it "unlimited," because they have to act under the direction of their chief. The CHAIRMAN. Is it a fact, then, that they confer with him right along from time to time as to whether they shall have this or that illustration? Mr. HILL. So far as I know, they do, because they have to send a requisition to us, if we do the work of illustration, which necessitates some consultation before it reaches us, and if the bureau employs its own illustrator and artist he generally has his hands full and does not care to undertake anything unless there is a necessity (Witness: Hill.) for it. I fancy that the result is that there is a consultation before there is very much illustrating done. But as it is, a great many of the illustrations are needed-for instance, in the case of the pomologists, an enormous number of illustrations are filed among their papers and indexed for reference that are not used in publications. The President himself called attention to overillustration in a letter which he addressed to the Secretary some three or four years ago. The CHAIRMAN. To overillustration? Mr. HILL. To overillustration. It had reached an unfortunate extent, there is no doubt of it, and it was one of the things I made myself extremely unpopular with these men about-checking these illustrations. Fortunately, the letter of the President helped very materially, because, by the Secretary's instructions, we sent a copy of it to all these bureaus and told them that there had got to be a "new deal;" that they had got to be more conservative in the matter of illustrations. And the result, Mr. Chairman, has been that in two years' time, while the publication work increased 10 per cent a year, the illustrations have been reduced 10 per cent each year. With all the additional printing we are doing over what we were doing three or four years ago, we are doing from 20 to 25 per cent less illustrating. The CHAIRMAN. Outside of the editorial supervision of the manuscript and the censorship of the illustrations-that, I suppose, is not too strong a word to use-what else does this Bureau of yours do? Mr. HILL. We organized an indexing section about a year and a half ago. The CHAIRMAN. For indexing what? Mr. HILL. For indexing the publications of the Department, which had remained unindexed for a long time. I have been trying for a long time to get help enough to do that work. The CHAIRMAN. Do you mean indexing the publications of the Department? Mr. HILL. Yes. The CHAIRMAN. Are those publications in the library? Mr. HILL. They are all in the library, of course; but we have a set, besides, in our division. The CHAIRMAN. Then your indexing is simply confined to the set that is in your charge? Mr. HILL. Yes; to the complete set. I am trying to get to a point where there will be an index to everything the Department has ever published. The CHAIRMAN. We were told by the librarian here the other day that she had all the indexing of that library, which includes this material which you speak of, completed and up to date within a year or two. Of course that must include these same publications, if they are in that library. Mr. HILL. They are not indexed as we are indexing-not in anything like the detail, as I understand it. There is an index to the general subject-matter, but ours is a detailed index. The CHAIRMAN. She has a subindex, so she told us. Mr. HILL. We have not been able to find that she had an index in the detailed form in which we are trying to make it. The CHAIRMAN. Have you ever examined her index? |