Correspondence, manuscripts, documents, financial records, photographs, drawings, engravings, and printed materials of Benjamin. The personal and business papers concern Benjamin's publishing and bookselling company, his numerous benefactions, the disposal of his collections, and many printed catalogs for his company, 1883-1940. The two major correspondents are the business and financial records for the printing, binding, and extensive promotion through a network of agents of Stedman's A LIBRARY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM THE EARLIEST SETTLEMENT TO THE PRESENT TIME; new ed. (New York, W.E. Benjamin, 1894). There are also letters, manuscripts, documents, and drawings of English literary figures collected by Benjamin. Among these are six letters of George Eliot, 47 letters and six manuscripts of John Ruskin, and three letters and one manuscript of Joseph Mallord Turner, with four letters relating to the artist. In addition there ten drawings and watercolors by Ruskin.

Also, 37 letters and one manuscript were removed from Benjamin's copy of Robert Langton's THE CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH OF CHARLES DICKENS and cataloged for this collection. One letter from Langton and 32 from others were addressed to Charles Roach Smith, a well-known antiquary of London. Several letters are concerned with numismatics (including two from John Stuart, Earl of Darnley, one each from William Henry Ashe, baron Heytesbury, and Chase Spence), but most of these letters relate to Charles Dickens: three letters from his son, Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, six from Henry Gardiner Adams, of the Mechanics' Institute of Chatham and Rochester, one each from Frederick William Fairholt, and Charles Stewart Montgomerie Lockhart, manuscript notes by John Gough Nichols, a letter from John Bowen Rowlands, one each from W.J. Taylor and Joseph Cotton Wigram, Bishop of Rochester, two from Humphrey Wood of the Mechanics' Institute, and of particular interest the two letters from Sampson Seaton, whose father was a friend of the father of the famous novelist. Many of these letters were written at the time of Dickens' death from people living in the area of Rochester and Chatham, his early childhood homes.