English Short Title Catalogue

The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is a short-title catalogue of works published between 1473 and 1800, mainly in Britain and North America, and primarily in English, from the collections of the British Library and other libraries.

It began life as the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, with the same abbreviation, covering only 1701 to 1800. Earlier printing had been covered to 1640 by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave's Short Title Catalogue (2nd edn, 1976–91), and from 1641 to 1700 by Donald Goddard Wing's similarly titled bibliography (1945–51, with later supplements and addenda). These works were eventually incorporated into the database.

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