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The David Kirby Rare Book Collection contains literature, poetry, chapbooks, and literary magazines from the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. The collection includes first edition, inscribed, and autographed volumes. Authors and poets present in the collection include Janet Burroway, Rudyard Kipling, H.E. Bates, Bin Ramke, and Thomas Hardy, as well as a run of Apalachee Review (originally Apalachee Quarterly) from 1973-1987. The collection also contains letters written to David Kirby from 1967-2016 by authors and poets including Joyce Carol Oates, Leon Edel, and Bruce Jay Friedman.

The collection includes a variety of cartographic materials, antiquarian book and map dealer records, correspondence, published articles, bibliographic materials, newspaper clippings, and publications. Highlights of the collection include historical materials and correspondence related to early explorers in North America. Cartographic materials included in the collection consist of map facsimiles, slides, and photostatic reproductions.

A collection of 25 nineteenth century newspapers mostly from Alabama, but also from Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, Louisiana and Georgia.

The Derrick Joshua Beard Collection contains the "Fats Waller" pencil sketch by George E. Neal. It also contains books.

This collection contains dime novels from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. These were cheap, mass-market fiction works sold in five, ten, and twenty cent formats that covered themes of adventure, crime, technology, the American Revolution, pirates, frontier life, the Wild West, and relations with Native Americans. This collection contains issues from popular dime novel publishers, including Frank Tousey, the Winner Library Co., Street and Smith, the George Marsh Company, Beadle and Adams, Norman L. Munro, the Arthur Westbrook Company, and R. M. de Witt. Because of their ephemeral nature, many dime novel publications have not survived. This collection offers a valuable look at American popular fiction from the turn of the twentieth century.