They examine the operation of the Office of the Mayor and the City Council, covering everything from the number of members and their annual salaries (Council Members receive $55,000 per year, the Council President $105,000) to the mayoral races of John V. Lindsay, Abraham Beame, and Edward I. Koch. Much of this encyclopedic work focuses on New York's ever-present financial woes, including the financial crisis of the mid-1970s, when the City had an unaudited deficit of over a billion dollars and the public credit markets closed their doors.