# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S316
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 102 —

...to have work done elsewhere, from which we suffer not only
annoyance but also loss. Any further expansion of our business is
therefore a physical impossibility unless we obtain more room to grow.

Now, we would not recommend an expansion of our business unless we
believed — so far as human beings can judge the future at all — that
our market, as it now stands, and especially as it ought to develop,
will place still greater demands on our capacity. In short, after
serious and careful deliberation, we believe we must recommend to the
Reverend Synod that a further building be erected on the property
acquired with such wisdom years ago. We ask for an appropriation of at
least $50,000.00, which sum should be available immediately.

We further venture the following recommendations: We repeat the
recommendation that the collection of the synodical assessment be
removed as a duty from the Concordia Publishing House. If we were to
make proposals to the Synod that go beyond the scope of our business,
we would in all earnestness recommend abolishing the so-called
synodical assessment altogether. In any case, in order to satisfy the
postal laws, any conflation of the synodical assessment with the
subscription for the synodical reports must be eliminated, as has in
fact already been done.

With regard to the synodical reports, we can report that limiting each
individual number to a maximum of 64 pages has contributed somewhat to
reducing the publishing house's loss on this item. What has helped
most in this respect are the handsome bulk orders we received from
several districts, on which — although the deliveries to the
individual districts themselves came out comparatively cheap — we
made a profit. If, however, it should become the practice that
individual districts, in the mass distribution of their district
reports, are satisfied with a quality that we are not permitted to
supply and, under present conditions, cannot supply, so long as they
merely save some money on their print run, and if under these
conditions the bulk orders should again be lost to us, then we would
indeed renew the recommendation we made at the Delegate Synod in Fort
Wayne, that the synodical reports be issued in the form of a monthly
or bimonthly periodical, under an editor-in-chief who should be made
not only responsible but also empowered to decide in all cases.

We repeat our recommendation that the venerable faculty of the
St. Louis Seminary be relieved of the obligation it has come to bear
by custom, namely, of exercising censorship over the job-printing work
of our press.

We repeat our recommendation of adequate professional fire insurance.