The collection consists primarily of papers of Frank Nelson Doubleday and his son, Nelson, relating to their personal and business relationships with prominent Doubleday authors and artists. Included are letters, manuscripts, and galleys of Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, T. E. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, and others; drawings by Kipling and his father, and by A. B. Frost and his sons; and letters from over 100 correspondents, including J. M. Barrie, Helen Keller, Christopher Morley, Frederic Remington, Gene Stratton-Porter, and Booth Tarkington, to members of the Doubleday family.

The collection includes approximately 190 letters of Kipling and the holograph manuscript, among others, of The Light That Failed (1891), presented by the author to Frank Nelson Doubleday in 1899. The holograph manuscript of The Razor's Edge, presented by Maugham to Nelson Doubleday at Christmas, 1944, highlights the second-generation acquisitions in the collection.

Additions to the collection include correspondence concerning the copyright and publication of works by O. Henry, and personal papers of Frank Nelson Doubleday, including a scrapbook and articles on his Red Cross trip to the Orient in 1918, typescript drafts of his autobiography, "Secret Memoirs of a Publisher," written in two installments (1926 and 1933) for private circulation, a journal (1897), a family genealogy, a 1734 English indenture, and photographs. Also present are financial and estate papers of Frank Nelson Doubleday, his two wives, Neltje Blanchan DeGraff Doubleday and Florence Van Wyck Doubleday, Lily Underhill Doubleday, Nelson Doubleday, Felix Doubleday, Samuel A. Everitt, and tax and estate papers (1930-1942) for Rudyard Kipling.