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The collection consists of letters from celebrities in various fields, largely addressed to Harry Harkness Flagler. Included are letters of Ambrose Bierce, Thomas A. Edison, Edwin Forrest, Andrew Jackson, Rudyard Kipling, Richard Mansfield, John D. Rockefeller, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Ruskin, Constantin Stanislavsky, and George Washington. Especially noteworthy are five letters of Charles Dickens, bound together in one volume.

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.