Franklin Library

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The Franklin Library was the publishing division of the Franklin Mint, which produced collectors books similar to those of the Easton Press for three decades.

Contents 1 History 2 The series 2.1 The 100 Greatest Books of All Time (1974-1982) 2.2 The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature (1976-1984) 2.3 The Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers (1977-1985) 2.4 60 Signed Limited Editions (1977-1982) 2.5 Pulitzer Prize Classics (1975-1980) 2.6 The (Signed) First Edition Society 3 See also

[edit] History

The Franklin Library published its first book in 1973, and closed its doors for good in 2000, after losing the competitive battle with The Easton Press for the popular market for finely bound leather books. Today, the lavishly produced leather books issued by the Franklin Library are highly sought after in the collectibles market.

The Franklin Library issued its books only to the subscribers to its various series. Most of the series were 100 book sets, and a single volume was issued monthly to subscribers. As a result, it took several years to complete a set. Other series, such as the Signed First Edition Society series, were open-ended with no limit on the number of titles published. And yet other books were issued as one-time offerings, such as the 500th anniversary leather-bound edition of the Oxford-English Reference Library, an eight book leather set issued with its own wooden shelf.

There is a very active online market for previously owned Franklin Library leather books on eBay.com, Abebooks.com and on other bookselling venues - including specialist dealers with their own websites for dealing in the books.

[edit] The series

Due to overlapping series themes, the same title appears in more than one series, but ordinarily with a differently designed binding.

[edit] The 100 Greatest Books of All Time (1974-1982)

Considered to be one of the more popular collections, the following titles were bound in genuine leather with 22k gold accents from 1974 to 1982:

• The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
• Oresteia by Aeschylus
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
• Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen
• Five Comedies by Aristophanes
• Politics by Aristotle
• Confessions of St. Augustine
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Selected Writings of Sir Francis Bacon
• Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
• The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
• Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake
• The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
• Jane Eyre By Charlotte Brontë
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
• Tales From The Arabian Nights by Sir Richard F. Burton
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Don Quixote de La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• Plays by Anton Chekhov
• Analects of Confucius
• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
• The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
• The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
• The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
• Stories of Guy de Maupassant
• Essays of Michel de Montaigne
• Philosophical Works of René Descartes
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Poems of John Donne
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
• Collected Poems (1909-1962) of T. S. Eliot
• Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Plays by Euripides
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• The Basic Works of Sigmund Freud
• The Poetry of Robert Frost
• Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Favorite Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm Brothers Grimm
• The Federalist by Hamilton, Madison and Jay
• The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• The Iliad by Homer
• The Odyssey by Homer
• Plays by Henrik Ibsen
• The Ambassadors by Henry James
• Nine Tales of Henry James
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• The Trial by Franz Kafka
• Poems of John Keats
• Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
• The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
• Five Stories of Thomas Mann
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• Political Writings of John Stuart Mill
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• Seven Plays by Molière
• Four Plays of Eugene O'Neill
• Political Writings of Thomas Paine
• Pensees by Blaise Pascal
• Satyricon by Petronius
• The Republic by Plato
• Twelve Illustrious Lives by Plutarch
• Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
• Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
• Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
• Six Tragedies by Jean Racine
• Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Eight Comedies by William Shakespeare
• Six Histories by William Shakespeare
• Poems of William Shakespeare
• Six Tragedies by William Shakespeare
• Three Plays by Bernard Shaw
• The Tragedies of Sophocles
• The Red and the Black by Stendhal
• Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• Walden by Henry D. Thoreau
• The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• The Aeneid by Virgil
• Candide by Voltaire
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats
• Nana by Emile Zola

[edit] The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature (1976-1984)

The following titles were bound in genuine leather with 22k gold accents from 1976-1984:

• The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
• Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams
• Twenty Years at Hull-House by Jane Addams
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
• The Collected Poems of W. H. Auden
• Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
• John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benét
• The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
• Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647 by William Bradford
• The Flowering of New England 1815-1865 by Van Wyck Brooks
• My Ántonia by Willa Cather
• The Complete Poems of Hart Crane
• The Collected Stories of Stephen Crane
• The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
• The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
• The DeerSlayer by James Fenimore Cooper
• The Collected Poems of E. E. Cummings
• Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana
• The Journals of Lewis and Clark edited by Bernard DeVoto
• Final Harvest by Emily Dickinson
• 1919 by John Dos Passos
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
• Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
• Dusk of Dawn by W. E. B. Du Bois
• Freedom of the Will by Jonathan Edwards
• The Collected Poems (1909-1962) of T. S. Eliot
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• Poor Richard's Almanack for 1733-1758 by Benjamin Franklin
• The Poems of Robert Frost
• The Federalist by Hamilton, Madison and Jay
• Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris
• The Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Six Plays by Lillian Hellman
• The First Forty-Nine Stories of Ernest Hemingway
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells
• The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. by Washington Irving
• The Ambassadors by Henry James
• The Selected Tales of Henry James
• Psychology by William James
• Pragmatism by William James
• The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson
• The Country of the Pointed Firs and 14 Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett
• Round Up, The Stories of Ring Lardner
• Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
• Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• The Collected Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
• A Mencken Chrestomathy by H. L. Mencken
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• Billy Budd, Sailor & The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville
• Typee by Herman Melville
• The Plays by Arthur Miller
• The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore
• Admiral of the Ocean Sea, A Life of Christopher Columbus by Samuel Eliot Morison
• Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972 by Lewis Mumford
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• McTeague by Frank Norris
• The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
• Four Plays of Eugene O'Neill
• Common Sense, The American Crisis and The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
• The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman
• Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
• Collected Poems and Essays on Poetry by Edgar Allan Poe
• Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
• Personae - A Draft of 30 Cantos by Ezra Pound
• Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson
• Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years by Carl Sandburg
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
• Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Walden by Henry D. Thoreau
• ‘’A Week on the Concord and Merrimak Rivers’’ by Henry D. Thoreau
• The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber
• The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner
• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
• The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
• All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
• Up From Slavery, an Autobiography by Booker T. Washington
• Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Plays of Thornton Wilder
• The Selected Plays by Tennessee Williams
• The Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams
• Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

[edit] The Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers (1977-1985)

The following titles were bound in genuine leather with 22k gold accents from 1977-1985:

• Notes from Underground, The Gambler, and Poor People by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• 28 Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy
• 27 Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
• Kiss Me Again Stranger by Daphne du Maurier
• The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• The Cabala, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and The Woman of Andros by Thornton Wilder
• Seven Gothic Tales of Isak Dinesen
• Mr. Moto's Three Aces by John P. Marquand
• The Collected Stories of Franz Kafka
• Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories by John Updike
• The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
• Sermons and Soda-Water by John O'Hara
• The First Forty-Nine Stories by Ernest Hemingway
• Stories From the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
• Moon Lake and 12 Other Stories by Eudora Welty
• Stories of Five Decades by Hermann Hesse
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• One Basket by Edna Ferber
• Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
• Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris
• The Apple Tree and Other Tales by John Galsworthy
• 35 Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• 38 Stories by Saki H. H. Munro
• Nabokov's Dozen by Vladimir Nabokov
• 13 Stories by Sinclair Lewis
• Three Exemplary Novels by Miguel de Cervantes
• The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and 18 Other Stories by Mark Twain
• The New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson
• 21 Collected Short Stories by Aldous Huxley
• Seven Tales by Henry James
• 17 Stories by Rudyard Kipling
• Three Tales by Gustave Flaubert
• 22 Stories by Edith Wharton
• The Country of the Pointed Firs and 4 Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett
• Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
• 14 Selected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham
• The Ranger and 3 Other Stories by Zane Grey
• Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories by Truman Capote
• 74 Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
• 30 Stories by Guy de Maupassant
• The Kreutzer Sonata and 10 Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
• The Troll Garden & Obscure Destinies by Willa Cather
• Thirteen O'Clock - Stories of Several Worlds by Stephen Vincent Benét
• 73 Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield
• The Best of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Queen of Spades and 3+ Other Tales by Alexander Pushkin
• 7 Stories by Booth Tarkington
• Peasants and 8 Other Stories Anton Chekhov
• Heart of Darkness and 10 Other Tales by Joseph Conrad
• The Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett
• 222 Fables, Fully Indexed by Aesop
• Round Up by Ring Lardner
• Tales of All Countries and 8 Other Stories by Anthony Trollope
• 16 California Stories by Bret Harte
• 25 Collected Stories by Dylan Thomas
• The Magic Barrel and Idiots First by Bernard Malamud
• From Death to Morning by Thomas Wolfe
• 45 Selected Stories by O. Henry
• Taras Bulba and 8 Other Tales by Nikolai Gogol
• These Thirteen by William Faulkner
• 5 Stories by Thomas Mann
• Here Lies. 24 Collected Stories by Dorothy Parker
• Four Short Novels by D. H. Lawrence
• Three Christmas Books by Charles Dickens
• The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber
• Guys and Dolls by Damon Runyon
• Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
• 4 Tales by E. T. A. Hoffmann
• The Wall and 5 Other Stories by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus
• First Love and 7 Other Tales by Ivan Turgenev
• 100 Fairy Tales by The Brothers Grimm
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
• This Gun for Hire, The Confidential Agent, The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
• A Descent into the Maelstrom and 23 Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
• Gimpel the Fool and 10 Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer
• 32 Droll Stories by Honore de Balzac
• Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and 22 Selected Stories by Stephen Crane
• Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
• 18 Stories by Heinrich Böll
• 27 Stories by Erskine Caldwell
• 22 Stories by Luigi Pirandello
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
• Laughing to Keep from Crying and 25 Jesse Semple Stories by Langston Hughes
• The Best (14) Short Stories by Theodore Dreiser
• In the Midst of Life - Tales of Soldiers and Civilians by Ambrose Bierce
• Stories by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
• 16 Tales of the Northland by Jack London
• Stories & Fairy Tales by Oscar Wilde
• Candide and Zadig by François Marie Arouet Voltaire
• Billy Budd, Sailor and The (6) Piazza Tales by Herman Melville
• Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot
• 36 Stories by Alexandre Dumas
• The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon Gent. by Washington Irving
• 8 Collected Short Stories by Carson McCullers
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
• Around the World in Eighty Days & From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne

[edit] 60 Signed Limited Editions (1977-1982)

Considered to be one of the most valuable, the following titles were bound in genuine leather with 22k gold accents from 1977 to 1982:

• The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss
• Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
• The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir
• Singer Gimpel, The Fool and Other Stories by Isaac Beshevis
• God’s Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell
• Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
• The Coming Fury by Bruce Catton
• A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
• The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
• Deliverance by James Dickey
• A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion
• The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
• Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
• A God Against the Gods by Allen Drury
• Justine by Lawrence Durrell
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• Young Lonigan by James T. Farrell
• The Collector by John Fowles
• The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
• Mary Queen Of Scotts by Antonia Fraser
• The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
• The Last Angry Man by Gerald Green
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Good As Gold by Joseph Heller
• A Bell for Adano by John Hersey
• The Wall by John Hersey
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
• Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash
• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
• Collected Plays of Arthur Miller
• Birds of America by Mary McCarthy
• The Group by Mary McCarthy
• Them by Joyce Carol Oates
• Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Patton
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
• Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
• Five Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre
• A Thousand Days by Arthur M. Schlesinger
• The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw
• The Affair by C.P. Snow
• The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner
• The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
• Lust for Life by Irving Stone
• The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
• Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron
• Rabbit Redux by John Updike
• Rabbit, Run by John Updike
• Exodus by Leon Uris
• Burr by Gore Vidal
• Julian by Gore Vidal
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
• Selected Poems (1923-1975) of Robert Penn Warren
• The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
• The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West
• In Search of History by Theodore H. White
• Selected Plays of Tennessee Williams
• The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
• Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk

[edit] Pulitzer Prize Classics (1975-1980)

This was a 53 volume collection of Pulitzer Prize winning novels, from the 1917 prize inception through 1979. The following titles were bound in genuine leather with 22k gold accents from 1975-1980:

• 1917 no prize for novel
• 1918 His Family by Ernest Poole
• 1919 The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkingon
• 1920 no prize for novel
• 1920 no prize for novel
• 1921 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
• 1922 Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington
• 1923 One of Ours by Willa Cather
• 1924 The Able McLaughlins Margaret Wilson
• 1925 So Big by Edna Ferber
• 1926 Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
• 1927 Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield
• 1928 The Bridge of San Luis by Rey Wilder
• 1929 Scarlet Sister by Mary Julia Peterkin
• 1930 Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge
• 1931 Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes
• 1932 The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
• 1933 The Store by T.S. Stribling
• 1934 Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller
• 1935 Now in November by Josephine Johnson
• 1936 Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis
• 1937 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• 1938 The Late George Apley by John Marquand
• 1939 The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
• 1940 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• 1941 no prize for novel
• 1942 In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow
• 1943 Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair
• 1944 Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin
• 1945 A Bell for Adano by John Hersey
• 1946 no prize for novel
• 1947 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
• 1948 Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
• 1949 Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
• 1950 The Way West by A.B. Guthrie, Jr.
• 1951 The Town by Conrad Richter
• 1952 The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
• 1953 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• 1954 no prize for novel
• 1955 A Fable by William Faulkner
• 1956 Andersonville by Mackinlay Kantor
• 1957 no prize for novel
• 1958 A Death in the Family by James Agee
• 1959 The Travels of Jaime Mcpheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
• 1960 Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
• 1961 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• 1962 The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor
• 1963 The Reivers by William Faulkner
• 1964 no prize for novel
• 1965 The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
• 1966 Collected Stories by Katherine Ann Porter
• 1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
• 1968 The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
• 1969 House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
• 1970 Collected Stories by Jean Stafford
• 1971 no prize for novel
• 1972 Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
• 1973 The Optimists Daughter by Eudora Welty
• 1974 no prize for novel
• 1975 The Killer Angels by Michael Sharra
• 1976 Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
• 1977 no prize for novel
• 1978 Elbow Room by James Alan Mcpherson
• 1979 The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever

[edit] The (Signed) First Edition Society

The Franklin Library published limited first editions of a large number of books. They were distributed to the members of its First Edition Society. Initially the books were unsigned and not numbered. Later the name was changed to the Signed First Editions Society, and the books issued to members were all signed by the authors, and in some cases were also numbered as to the limitation.

[edit] See also

• Easton Press
• Folio Society
• Oxford Press