This collection includes nine letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as letters of Louis Agassiz, Amos Bronson Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Lothrop Motley, Charles Sumner, and John Greenleaf Whittier. In addition, there are two incomplete manuscripts by Emerson and one document from the Liverpool Custom-house signed by Nathaniel Hawthorne as Consul for the United States. The collection also includes the corrected typescript, index, and page and galley proofs for Thomas Franklin Currier, A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (New York, 1953) which was edited by Professor Tilton. Also, some early correspondence and photographs of the Tilton family and friends. There are letters from the actors Annie Louise Ames, Richard J. Dillon, and Hans L. Meery to Tilton's grandfather, Bernard Paul Verne, as well as photographs, tintypes, and daguerreotypes of the Verne family and friends.

The collection consists of the editorial and production archives of Random House, Inc. from its founding in 1925 to the 1990s. The correspondence and editorial files include many of the prominent novelists and short story writers from 20th-century American and European literature: Saul Bellow; Erskine Caldwell; Truman Capote; William Faulkner; Sinclair Lewis; André Malraux; Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. Among the poets there are files for W. H. Auden; Allen Ginsberg; Robinson Jeffers; Robert Lowell; and Stephen Spender. In the area of theater there are files for Maxwell Anderson; Moss Hart; Lillian Hellman; Eugene O'Neill; and Tennessee Williams. Random House transacted business with many fine presses and noted typographers and the archives contain files for Nonesuch Press, Grabhorn Press and Golden Cockerel Press, as wll as for Bruce Rogers, Valenti Angelo, and Edwin, Jane, and Robert Grabhorn.