It focuses on the foundational documents of the field, beginning with the 1736 paper of Leonhard Euler on the Seven Bridges of Königsberg and ending with the first textbook on the subject, published in 1936 by Dénes Kőnig.

Graph Theory, 1736–1936 was edited by Norman L. Biggs, E. Keith Lloyd, and Robin J. Wilson, and published in 1976 by the Clarendon Press.

[2] It begins with Euler's 1736 paper "Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis" on the seven bridges of Königsberg (both in the original Latin and in English translation) and ending with Dénes Kőnig's book Theorie der endlichen und unendlichen Graphen.

Next, a chapter on circuits includes material on knight's tours in chess (a topic that long predates Euler), Hamiltonian cycles, and the work of Thomas Kirkman on polyhedral graphs.

[2] Perfect calls the book "fascinating ... full of information", thoroughly researched and carefully written,[3] and Maziarz finds inspiring the ways in which it describes serious mathematics as arising from frivolous starting points.