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The Editorial and Bibliographic Materials 1940-2008 series (boxes 39-65) is from the Kurath, Kuhn, and Lewis eras, though they also include files that began in the Moore and Knott eras but continue into the following eras. The series consists of seven sub-series: Miscellaneous Files, Bibliography File, Title File MED Library File, Abbreviations for Periodicals and Serials, the Master Bibliography, and Quoting Instructions.

The first two-fifths of box 39 contains the Miscellaneous Files sub-series from 1946 to 1954, on a variety of topics: names of readers and consultants, lists of regional texts and manuscripts, a list of manuscript abbreviations used in the Plan and Bibliography of 1954, a list of selected Middle English manuscripts with dialect notes, a list of short titles not in boxes 39-43, and Kurath's distribution list for the first fascicle (E.1, published in 1952).

The Bibliography File sub-series begins with the second three-fifths of box 39 and continues through the first quarter of box 43. It is a bibliographical file on cards: specifically, an alphabetically arranged conversion list of pre-Kurath-era titles of Middle English works, with the new short title (or "stencil" as it was called at the MED) on the same card, below. This list, which was made between the late 1940s and 1952 (before the publication of fascicle E.1), contains what the MED calls "texts" (the short titles of longer works) and "incipits" (the first few words of a short piece of verse) combined together, unlike the later printed MED bibliographies (1954, 1984, 2007), which separate the two.

The Title File (boxes 43-44) also contains a list of titles, this time of MED texts first, and then incipits, generally alphabetical in multiple series, with a very brief description of the contents of each, made in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

The MED Library File sub-series (boxes 44-46) contains a listing of the books in the former MED library as it existed in 1976, with later additions up to 2001.

The Abbreviations for Periodicals and Serials sub-series, alphabetically arranged, and includes information on which text or texts are in each periodical or serial. This list was compiled by MED bibliographer Mary Jane Williams between 1985 and the mid- to late 1990s.