The material in this collection is diverse in subject and in form. It includes books, manuscripts, brochures and other promotional material, programs, government documents, proceedings, directories, reports, pages from a newspaper and a clipped piece of letterhead. Subjects range from very general accounts of the history and culture of Michigan to very specific topics such as a beer license law. There is over a hundred and fifty year range in publication dates. The categories were of necessity made very broad.

Because the history of Detroit is so broad, and well represented in other collections across the state, this collection holds relatively few items concerning the history of Detroit.

In preparation for and after the Library’s 2000 move to the temporary location at Hall and 131, a considerable amount of shelf reading and book inventory was done. It was decided that especially rare, fragile and/or small books should be pulled from the reading room shelves where they were vulnerable to theft or damage. This collection and one other were formed from these pulled books. A large percentage of the material in this collection was previously cataloged, though some items that were not have been added.