Following the 1917 death of Herbert Langford Warren, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Harvard University, Kimball recovered and edited Warren's partial draft for the first volume of what he had intended as a three-volume, comprehensive history of architecture. Kimball wrote an introduction to accompany the essay, and it was published in 1919 by the Macmillan Company under the title "The Foundations of Classic Architecture," reflecting the limited scope of the work. The records are comprised of Kimball's correspondence with Macmillan negotiating the work's publication, letters to and from Warren's relatives, specifically his wife, daughter and his brother, who contributed the illustrations for the chapter headings. Also included is Kimball's heavily corrected copy of Warren's typescript including annotated photographs of nearly all the illustrations and a manuscript draft of Kimball's introduction.