The material is predominantly literary and is chiefly confined to the 19th century. Among the more notable items are:

Seven letters of Allan Cunningham, 1828-1840, chiefly to Captain Charles Gray of the Royal Marines, with an undated manuscript of the poem 'The standard bearer' published in ‘Poems and songs’ (London, 1847) by Cunningham, under the title 'The Cavalier' (folios 43-59);

Papers of James Hogg, including manuscripts of his poems 'A Scottish ballad', circa 1823, 'The harp of Teviot', circa 1812, 'Journey of the soul', 1827, 'Come down the brae Donald', undated, all apparently unpublished, with the manuscript of 'The skylark', undated, published in ‘The works of the Ettrick Shepherd’ (London, 1873) by Hogg, and a copy, 1803, of ‘Donald McDonald’, his first published song of 1800 (folios 73-83);

Single letters of Joanna Baillie, 1829, undated, John Stuart Blackie, 1886, 1891, undated, Henry, Lord Cockburn, 1847, Charles Dickens, 1858, Sir George Harvey, 1870, John Pettie, 1887, Sir Walter Scott, 1815, undated, and William Wordsworth, 1849.

At the end of the volume is a group of miscellaneous autographs of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century individuals, and a number of receipts and documents concerning Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Batty, an amateur draughtsman who made extensive tours of Europe in the early nineteenth century.