Franklin Library

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.

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.

The series

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

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

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

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
* P"igeon 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

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

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 Mary" by 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

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.

ee also

* Easton Press
* Folio Society
* Oxford Press