Between 1947 and 1948, Georgia O'Keeffe shipped several boxes of books to New Mexico from her and her late husband's, Alfred Stieglitz, collections at their New York apartment and the Lake George house. This was the beginning of O'Keeffe's personal book collection in New Mexico. O'Keeffe grew her collection by purchasing and seeking out books on particular subjects; others she received as gifts from friends, admirers of her work, authors, and museums, which is documented through her habit of storing accompanying gift cards and correspondence within the books. Publications cover a wide range of topics such as art history, art techniques, health, world history, travel, dogs, gardening, and cooking.

During O'Keeffe's lifetime, the books traveled back and forth between her two New Mexico homes, Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu. The books from Ghost Ranch were donated to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum by Juan and Anna Marie Hamilton in 2000 and are now referred to as the Ghost Ranch Library. Publications from the Ghost Ranch Library are held at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's Michael S. Engl Family Foundation Library and Archive and are searchable in the library catalog. Most of the items in this archival collection were housed within the books and periodicals and were used as page markers within the Ghost Ranch Library books. Materials include but are not limited to correspondence, notes, ephemera, and clippings dating from 1892 to 1992. There are few items in this collection with a publication date after O'Keeffe's death date in 1986. This is likely due to the books remaining at Ghost Ranch and in limited use several years after O'Keeffe's death.

In order to document the archival item original location within the books, the materials in this collection were processed at the item level and all items have an accession number, which starts with 2000-06- and is noted in the finding aid. The original book location has been noted in the archives database by title and Library of Congress Control Number. Similarly, the archival material has been noted in the catalog record for the book.

Accruals to the collection include recipe binders from the Ghost Ranch house, which were similarly processed at the item level, but without the 2000-06- accession numbers.

The library and archival materials in O'Keeffe's Abiquiu house were later transferred to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum from The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation in 2006. The book collection, titled the Abiquiu Bookroom collection, has been catalogued and included in the library collection. The archival collection is ephemera found in Abiquiu Bookroom books; it is unprocessed and will be called the Abiquiu Bookroom Papers.