Edward G. Levy made his first deposit of materials to the Fales Library in December 1964 with the idea of establishing a representative collection of nineteenth-century popular fiction at NYU. Larger shipments followed between May of 1965 and August of 1967. In November of 1969 Mr. Levy formally donated all previous deposits to the Fales Library. He also presented additional items at this time to bring the total number of items up to 8,427. Further gifts arrived in August 1973, November 1974, and September 1975 adding approximately 8,400 items for a total of nearly 17,000 items.

Itemized checklists exist for most of the gifts received by the library, some prepared by Mr. Levy prior to shipment and some by the Fales staff upon receipt. An unknown number of items were integrated into the Fales American and British collections and some items were sent to the circulating collection but no documentation of these transfers exists.

In the mid-1990s the Levy materials were packed into archival folders and boxes for storage and a box-level checklist was created. In 2003-2004 this item-level finding aid was created without further physical reorganization of the materials.