The catalogue table contains one row for each of the 2291 items listed in Catalogue C, as well as a line for each of the 302 items in Catalogue A which cannot be identified with reasonable confidence with any item listed in C. Finally it contains a line for each of the 19 items in Catalogue B which cannot be identified with anything in either A or C. In each row the first column is an internal reference number unique to the present catalogue. The second contains a transcription of the entry in the source used: that is from Catalogue C if available; failing that from A, and failing that from B. Transcriptions from the sources are literal; capitalization is retained (but not italics); [sic] is not used. In the sources, words and phrases are sometimes repeated from the previous entry using a long dash or the notations ‘ib.’ or ‘ibid.’ In our transcriptions these are replaced by the word or words intended – usually an author’s name or place of publication – placed in square brackets. Groups of dashes used to fill horizontal space are transcribed as a single dash.
The following columns provide the author’s name and the date and place of publication in a normalised form. These are provided to facilitate searching and ordering; apart from the occasional correction of obvious errors they do not attempt to improve on the information in the sources. The language of the item is also reported; this is essentially a report of the language in which the title is given in the source (foreign-language dictionaries are listed in the language of which they are dictionaries). It is therefore likely to overestimate the prevalence of English-language works, and may underestimate the number of works in more than one language.
The ‘sources’ column indicates in which of the three source catalogues the item appears; if it appears in C the lot number is given in parentheses. The ‘notes’ column gives explanatory notes appearing in the source catalogues; indications in the manuscripts that certain items are bound with other titles are reported, however, only when these add information to what is implied by the lot numbers in Catalogue C. Where the bibliographic details in the catalogues differ by more than a single-character error the fact is reported here. This column also reports the status of certain entries as additions in the manuscript catalogues A and B, and reports the presence of ticks by certain entries in the manuscripts. Finally the scant information about later trajectories and present locations of certain items is reported. References to Weale are to A Catalogue of Books, on the Sciences: astronomy, mathematics, natural philosophy, &c. with some added that are curious and miscellaneous, chiefly from the libraries of Rev. Nevil Maskelyne … Bishop Horsley … Dr. Charles Hutton … William Phillips … and Richard Heber … On sale, by John Weale … 59, High Holborn, London, originally issued with the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine, series 3, no. 6 (April 1835), in which sixteen items (out of more than a thousand) are identified as having been Hutton’s. References to Wallis are to Peter John Wallis, ‘Newcastle mathematical libraries: William Armstrong, Charles Hutton and others’, Northern Notes 4 (1972: supplement).