The volumes of plates, relatively unaffected by censorship, were released at the rate of roughly one per year from 1761-1772. In its original printing, about 4,000 copies were made. It was hailed, and also persecuted, as the sum of modern knowledge, as the a monument to the progress of reason in the eighteenth century. Each of the 17 volumes of text contains an average of 950 two-column folio pages. There are multiple entries for many words that reflect the use of the term in different domains.
Legends precede each group of plates.
Individual plates frequently contain multiple figures, usually in combination with references numbers or characters that coordinate with the text of the legends. In addition, the original estimate of 600 plates soon proved to be insufficient. These factors made coordination of the text and the plates difficult. In some cases, the authors were able to consult the completed images while writing their articles and to give precise references to the pertinent plate and figure numbers. In other cases, the plates were drawn long after the completion of the articles, and sometimes there is very little correlation between the two.