Arthur Mizener, professor of English at Cornell University (1951-1973), wrote about the creation of the first-line index (January 26, 1965): "Roughly speaking, I did through the 17th century and he [Boys] did from there on. When the bibliographical society finally backed down on the publication, we stopped work on the project. It was fairly complete; in fact, it is complete except for some items that are dubiously miscellanies that we had nonetheless decided to include. It includes all poems in foreign languages (including Anglo-Saxon...), though we were pretty sure these would not be included in any final published index."

Richard Charles Boys, professor English language and literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (1937-1974), wrote (April 12, 1965): "I, too, would be willing to transfer what I have of our index to your library... Speaking for myself only, I have no interest in putting it in shape for publication... Some work would have to be put in on my part of the index... What we have is extremely useful, though it is (as a guess for my section) perhaps 85-90% complete...there are things missing. There would also have to be some consultation on the number designation of the miscellanies. We began with Case, of course, but have added to his list. In fact, I have some materials for a supplement to Case (short-title), which I shall probably never get to for publication."

Mizener added on April 9, 1979, "As Dicky Boys will no doubt have told you already, he and I made a large number of additions to Case's bibliography in the process of our work, and we wrote these into our copy of Case by interleaving it. We then gave these new copies of miscellanies numbers by adding a 4th digit to the number Case gives for the work immediately preceding the insertion. Thus, 951 means a miscellany added by us that falls in the sequence immediately after 95 and before 96 in the Case enumeration. By this late date I have no idea of what has become of the copy of Case in which these additions were made and if you people haven't got it I suppose the knowledge represented by these numbers has disappeared." The interleaved copy of Case is not present in this collection of material received from Boys and Mizener, but several lists of additions to Case made by Boys are included in the collection and supply similar information.