Public Library Catalog had its inception in the early 1900s when the H.W. Wilson Company considered ways to meet the needs of the general library user. The initial response was the publication in 1908 of a modest version of Fiction Catalog. The first of several installments of the "Standard Catalog" for the general library was published in 1918. It was called Standard Catalog: Sociology Section and was considered a test section, issued with the expectation that helpful criticism would be forthcoming from librarians before the full catalog was published.

Additional installments of the test sections, covering Biography; Fiction; Fine Arts; History and Travel; Science and Useful Arts; Literature and Philology; and Philosophy, Religion and General Works, were issued over the next fourteen years. Finally, it was determined that the test sections had proven themselves, and a fully integrated first edition of the Standard Catalog for Public Libraries (later to be renamed Public Library Catalog) was assembled and published in 1934. The contents were displayed under the rubrics of the latest version of the Dewey Decimal Classification—a practice that has continued with each succeeding edition of the Catalog.

Although a Fiction Section was issued in 1923, followed by supplements in 1928 and 1931, fiction was omitted from the first edition of the Catalog in 1934. The omission seems to have been for two reasons: the need to keep the Catalog to manageable size and the desire to develop an improved subject approach to works of fiction. A new expanded edition of Fiction Catalog was published in 1942. In its preface the Catalog referred to itself as "a companion volume to the Standard Catalog for Public Libraries." This complementary relationship has continued to the present. Users of the latest edition of Fiction Catalog and its four supplements will find works of literary criticism and literary history and books about literary technique in generous measure in the Public Library Catalog.