The collection consists of over 3000 miscellaneous items of primarily American literary, historical, and political figures, including business and personal letters, cards, manuscripts, drawings, photographs, and official documents (deeds, wills, bonds, etc.). This miscellaneous collection provides a way of locating small accessions of material that are not part of the Manuscripts Division's provenance-based or topical collections.

The collection includes documents from United States presidents James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, Rutherford B. Hayes, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, William Howard Taft, and Martin Van Buren. The collection also contains original documents of Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, Jefferson Davis, Frederick Douglass, Sigmund Freud, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, J. P. Morgan, Samuel Morse, Benito Mussolini, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Orwell, Thomas Paine, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Revere, J. D. Salinger, Jean-Paul Satre, William Tecumseh Sherman, Upton Sinclair, Henry Morton Stanley, John Steinbeck, Bram Stoker, Alexis de Toqueville, Jules Verne, Booker T. Washington, E. B. White, and Virginia Woolf, to name only a few of the most famous.