The US Census Bureau offers this exhaustive compendium of national, regional, state, local, and selected international statistics drawn from "reports and records of government and private agencies." The book (Adobe Acrobat [.pdf] format only) is divided into 31 topical chapters, composed mostly of annual time series data. Unfortunately, as there is no table of contents, the best finding aid is the subject index, which identifies table numbers (not page numbers). An additional shortcoming is that the Bureau has not supplied table number limits with each chapter heading, as it did with the 1995 Statistical Abstract. Still, by locating the tables of interest in the index, and then making an educated guess as to which chapter those tables would be located in, along with using Acrobat's search capability, one can actually use this book in its electronic format. This volume, published annually since 1878, is known as "the national data book."