Providing access to over 6,500 house designs published between 1850 and 1915, this work is indexed by architects' or designers' names as well as by the geographic location of each house when given in the periodical. It also includes a geographic index of architects, an annotated bibliography of the periodicals indexed, and an illustrated section with samples of the designs included in the index.

Southern Homes and Plan Books showcases the architectural legacy and design philosophy of Leila Ross Wilburn (1885-1967), a legacy that includes hundreds of houses in a variety of popular house styles, from bungalows to ranch houses, built using Wilburn's plan books during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Wilburn opened her own firm in Atlanta in 1909 and practiced until her death in 1967. She published nine plan books that offered mail order house designs to contractors, builders, and prospective homeowners and allowed them the ease of choosing a preconceived design and construction plan. Sarah J. Boykin and Susan M. Hunter provide a survey of the southern homes built from Wilburn's plan books, examining Wilburn's architectural legacy and her achievements as a plan book architect. The book provides beautiful photographs of houses built from her plans, along with illustrations from the plan books themselves and other related documents from the time. Readers can thus see how her designs were realized as individual houses and also how they influenced the development of some of the Atlanta area's beloved historical neighborhoods, most notably Druid Hills, Morningside, Virginia-Highlands, and Candler Park, as well as the MAK (McDonough, Adams, and Kings Highway) district in Decatur. Today, Wilburn's houses are enjoyed as appealing, historic homes and represent some of the richest examples of southern vernacular architecture to emerge from the plan book tradition.