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The collection consists of a wide range of material from early Pantheon papers (1944-1963) pertaining to the presence of Jacques Schiffrin and Helen and Kurt Wolff, including correspondence, business files, manuscripts and proofs, book covers, and media clippings. Later papers include correspondence and business files from Andre Schiffrin's time at Pantheon, followed by press clippings and correspondence regarding his forced removal, his launch of New Press, books he published, and finally personal papers that include notebooks, travel diaries and journals, along with his articles in various publications and miscellaneous press that he'd collected for personal interest.

The editorial and production files of Pantheon Books from 1944 through 1968. The correspondence from authors, agents, and publishers is written to Kurt and Helen Wolff, Jacques Schiffrin, André Schiffrin, and the editors of the firm. The files document the publication of works by A. Alvarez, Georges Bernanos, Hermann Broch, Jacob Burckhardt, Albert Camus, William Demby, Eugene Ionesco, Karl Jaspers, Winifred Bryher, Jacques Maritain, Isamu Noguchi, José Ortega y Gasset, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sir Herbert Read, Ben Shahn, and others.

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.

Correspondence, memoranda, photoreproductions of manuscript excerpts by Kafka, publicity files, production records, and printed materials for the works of the Austrian author, Franz Kafka, in German and English translations, 1940-1977. These extant files were set aside by David Rome, the former president of Schocken Books, after the firm was purchased by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, several years ago. The files consist mainly of production files for the first American editions of THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA (1946), LETTERS TO MILENA (1948), ERZAHLUNGEN UND KLEINE PROSA (1957), and FRANZ KAFKA: BRIEFE (l958). Also included is a publicity file aimed at American Jewish organizations and college and university German departments promoting SAMLICHE WERKE edited by Max Brod as well as his biography of Kafka, and a marked master galley proof for PARABLES AND PARADOXES (1958). Also included are photocopies and mimeograph copies of playscripts based on Kafka's DIARY and METAMORPHOSES and a script by Michael McClure, JOSEPHINE, based on a character of the same name in Kafka's story, THE MOUSE FOLK. There is correspondence with Professor Heinz Pollitzer concerning the promotion of publishing Kafka's writings in the early 1960s. The printed materials are chiefly book reviews of Kafka's publications and some scholarly articles on Kafka.

Todd Gitlin (1943-2022) was an activist, author, poet, and scholar of mass media at Columbia University. A leader of the anti-war group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s and a self-identified progressive for his whole life, he became a noted critic of the American left from the 1990s on for a perceived overemphasis on identity and cultural issues.