It is hard to imagine how, given his conducting duties and travel schedules, Hans Richter found the time to record in his conducting books every opera, concert and Hofkapelle (Court Chapel) service he conducted, together with details for each entry of venue, date, soloist, programme, opera and even some occasional comments. His first public appearance was at a concert in his home town of Raab on 19 September 1865. To begin with, Richter lists just the works performed in each concert programme or the opera's title and at the end of the first of the six books, a summary of how many performances he has conducted of each opera to that date: for example, he had reached his seventh of Der Tribut von Zamora by Gounod on 20 March 1884. Thereafter, from the second book, he places the accumulating number of times he has conducted each opera as it appears, starting with his eleventh of Tristan und Isolde on 23 March 1884. Every tenth performance, whether opera, concert or chapel duty, is logged, starting with Der erste Glückstag (Le premier jour de bonheur) by Gluck on 7 October 1869. For the purposes of this book, dates (originally entered in German with ditto marks until a change of month) are listed in English with no such marks, for instance 4ter Jänner, 1880 is 4 January 1880. A few changes of programme are noted by Richter and on two or three occasions even the printed slip produced for the public's benefit is pasted in.

Misspellings, inconsistencies or inaccuracies have in general been left as Richter wrote them. Operas are usually given their German titles, for example Wilhelm Tell by Rossini but La traviata by Verdi. However, the spelling of artists’ names remains as he wrote them; works performed in England are often listed in their English version but Beethoven's Ninth or Choral Symphony is always referred to as ‘Die Neunte’ even in performances beyond Germany, while Tchaikovsky's (almost always spelt Tschaikowsky) Sixth Symphony soon becomes simply Pathétique. The first performance of Elgar's Enigma Variations (19 June 1899) appears as it does on the title page of the score, namely ‘Variations for full orchestra’, on 16 March 1904 and 3 December 1906 as ‘Variations on an original theme’ (with or without Op. 36), the remaining thirty performances simply ‘Variations’ – Richter never uses the word Enigma.