Today, the government pays special attention to science and science popularization. This includes legal regulation, in particular, and makes the focus of the humanities scholars. However, the issues of the origins of science education of the community, including via the librarianship, are understudied. The goal of this study is to reveal and analyze the legislative acts on non-formal education regulations adopted in 1725–1917. The study focused on the documents comprising definitions related to the science popularization in its modern sense. In Part 2, the author discusses the results of content analysis of the legal documents regulating publishing, censorship regulation, and efforts of scientific societies and people’s universities, and their libraries. The author concludes that no system approach was applied to the government regulation of science popularization.