After leaving school without a degree, he worked as a newspaper reporter, statistician, free-lance designer, and printing broker.

[2] After several years, his design work came to the attention of Ingalls Kimball, who appointed McMurtrie general manager of the Cheltenham Press.

Though he designed one typeface for Ludlow, his duties there primarily consisted of writing advertising copy.

Having established himself as one of the most important bibliographers of printing, McMurtrie was appointed to head up the Works Progress Administration’s American Imprints Inventory, (AII) a position he held until 1941.The AII was organized to locate and record books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed in the United States from the earliest times up to the date of Frederick Leypoldt's "United States Catalog," which began in 1876.

[5][6] This project resulted in thirty-five publications as well as more than fifteen million documents being deposited in the Library of Congress.