This chapter describes the preliminary analysis of the surviving record of eighteenth-century imprints in Britain and Ireland based on an ordered sampling of the English short-title catalogue (ESTC). Altogether, the 34,335 records scrutinized yielded some 134,732 items of data. This information was acquired by examining every record for information pertinent to five principal categories: genre, place of publication, bibliographical format, length (in sheets) and reprints and/or repeat publications. When one considers one-sheet formats, that is, both unfolded publications such as broadsides in their several manifestations and single-sheet pamphlets, he/she should be even more troubled by the inherent uncertainties introduced both by the ephemerality of such forms and by the cataloguing practices of the ESTC. It is important to bear in mind too that reprints were likely to be published in smaller formats than first editions, increasingly so as the century progressed, and that these 'little books last least'.