The collection consists of manuscripts, letters, and documents of numerous and varied authors and artists that span nearly five centuries of English and American literature. There is a variety of related material, such as such as artwork, illustrated albums, letterbooks, and photographs.

Authors most extensively represented include the so-called "Taylor authors"-Max Beerbohm (with numerous caricatures and drawings, correspondence and manuscripts), Alexander Pope, Richard Brinsley Sheridan; George Gordon Byron, and Anthony Trollope.

Other writers significantly represented in the collection, with regard to manuscripts and/or letters, are: the Brontë family (Anne, Charlotte, and Patrick), Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Alfred Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, the Trollope family (Frances Milton, Henry Merivale, T. Adolphus, and Frances Eleanor), Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. The major artists include William Blake, Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"), George Cruikshank, Edward Lear, John Everett Millais, William Makepeace Thackeray, and J. M. W. Turner.

Note: A listing of Taylor Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts (Series 4) is included as a reference for researchers, but full textual and codicological descriptions of them will eventually be published in a "Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library."