The Éléments have had a complex publication history. From the 1940s through the 1960s, Bourbaki published the Éléments in booklet form as small installments of individual chapters, known in the French as fascicules. Despite having settled on a logical sequence for the work (see below), Bourbaki did not publish the Éléments in the order of its logical structure. Rather, the group planned the arc of the work in broad strokes and published disparate chapters wherever they could agree on a final product, with the understanding that (logically) later chapters published (chronologically) first would ultimately have to be grounded in the later publication of logically earlier chapters. The first installment of the Éléments to be published was the Summary of Results for the Theory of Sets in 1939; the first proper chapter of content on set theory—with proofs and theorems—did not appear until 1954. Independently of the work's logical structure, The early fascicules were assigned chronological numberings by the publisher Hermann for historical reference. Gradually, the small fascicules were collected and reprinted in larger volumes, forming the basis of the modern edition of the work.
