Franklin Library

From its founding in 1973 until it closed permanently in 2000, the Franklin Library was one of the two largest publishers in the United States of leather bound books. Today, the high quality leather books produced by the Franklin Library are sought after by collectors. The books were arranged in several series consisting of 50-100 books each. Customers subscribed to a particular series and received one book per month, as long as their subscription remained current, until the entire series had been delivered. Thus, it could take over eight years to complete a 100 book set, such as The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written series.

Today, the books can only be acquired on the secondary market. The eBay community is one of the largest online auction sites in which collectors are able to purchase and sell Franklin Library books, both individually and in lots. Most titles are also easily obtainable on abebooks, Amazon, and similar sites, or from booksellers and bookshops specializing in antiquarian or collectible books.

Although most of the Franklin Library collections were issued in the full leather bindings (like to per book), some were also simultaneously issued in alternate binding materials such as “faux leather” — also called “leatherette” or imitation leather ( per book). Like the best-bound books, these particular better-bound books were printed on archival paper or acid-free paper to prevent yellowing or tanning. They were also gold gilted and decorated on the covers and the edges of the pages of the book were also gilt in gold to protect the paper from damage due to humidity. Other books were isued in quarter bound leather ( per book) — consisting of a “coated cloth” cover with a leather spine like the Franklin Mystery Series.

Some of their earlier, smaller collections were bound in ‘bonded leather’ (made of leather strips and scraps). This has given rise to a myth that Franklin books bound in other than leather are somehow inferior in publishing standards (such as Easton Press). While some Franklin books are, in fact, not covered in ‘real’ leather, they are still considered to hold high standards of publishing quality.

Of course, the vast majority of their finer collections were bound in the highest degree of publishing bindings like genuine leather, silk pictorial end-pages and silk ribbons attached for a bookmark (like Easton Press). As a cost-cutting measure, Franklin Library Press went into satin or marbled moir end sheets and satin ribbons in its Signed First Editions series.

In addition to the cost of the book, subscribers were expected to pay shipping & handling charges as well as sales taxes. As time went on, later subscribers were asked to pay higher prices.

First Editions

Many publishers in the publishing world, including the original publisher of a book, issued “Limited First Editions” of certain books, especially those of popular authors or books that were particularly important due to award nominations, movie deals, or critical acclaim. Consequently, they represent a different category of books as compared to the typical “trade” edition books.

These “Limited First Editions” were issued in limited numbers (about 100 to 1000 and sometimes even more) and they were issued with a particular designation to set them apart by giving them a special distinction such as a special binding, a slipcase, hand-numbering, a signature by the author, or any combination (or all) of the above. Many of these ‘special’ editions were simultaneously published with the “trade” editions or were done sometimes later.

Some small press publishers actually bought the pages from the original publisher and placed them in a special binding of their own design, had them signed by the author, and had them numbered.

Others, like Easton Press, do their own printing also, using special paper, and they release the “Limited First Edition” up to a year or more after the “trade” edition has been publishedomething that had made a claim of a true “First Edition” somewhat questionable.

In the case of the Franklin Library, it was their policy to contract for the printing rights of the “First Edition” with both the author and the mass-market publisher first, thus making the Franklin Library edition a “true-first-edition” that was published prior to the “trade” edition. This is something that added considerably to the value of their books. To emphasize this difference or distinction, the Franklin Library “trade” editions bore a statement of “First trade edtion” on the copyright page and had a disclaimer stating that “A signed first edition of this book has been privately printed by the Franklin Library Press.” Thus, this statement acknowledged that the “First Edition” issued by the Franklin Library Press was indeed the first printing of the book and truly and accurately described as a “first edition.”

A question often asked is: What is the difference between the “First Edition” and the “First Signed Edition”? The difference consists in the fact that a “first edition” contained a signed introduction that was printed along with the book, that is, a “print” of the signature but not a ‘real’ or authentic or personal signature done in ink by hand. The “First Signed Edition” series, something Franklin Library Press started doing in 1983, consisted of a hand-signed authentic and ‘real’ signature done by the author for that one particular book, usually done on a separate page that was then bound into the book. A separate and loosely placed tissue or onion-skin paper was placed over it to protect the printed pages.

The series

Due to overlapping series themes, the same title may appear in more than one series, but ordinarily with a differently designed binding. Many of the book collections issued by the Franklin Library were “open” or “trade” editions, therefore, no edition figures are available.

Here is a list of the individual series:

100 Greatest Books of all Time (leather, 1974-1982, .00; leatherette, 1973-1986, .00) First Edition Society (leather, 1976-1980) Pulitzer Prize Series (leather, 1975-1982) 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature (leather, 1976-1984, .00) 60 Signed Limited Editions (leather, 1977-1982, .00) – (the most spectacular collection) Stories of the World’s Greatest Writers (leather, 1977-1985) 20th Century’s Greatest Books (leather, 1977-1982, .00) World’s Best-Loved Books (leather, 1977-1986, .00) Great Books of the Western World (leather, 1978-1985) – a great one to own! World’s Great Books Family Library (quarter-bound, 1979-1984) Heirloom Library of the World’s Greatest Books (quarter-bound, 1979-1983) Oxford Library of the World’s Great Books (quarter-bound, 1981-1985). Note: e-Bay member book fever has provided examples of at least some of this series proving that they were issued in full leather as well. Greatest Books of the World’s Greatest Writers (cloth, 1981-1985) Signed First Edition Society (leather, 1983-2000) Franklin Mystery Series (cloth and leather versions, 1986-1989 – offered in either leather or cloth; the leather versions didn’t sell well and they were discontinued. The leather editions version contained a different or separate list and didn’t follow the same sequence of the cloth editions. Metropolitan Museum of Art (cloth and leather versions, 1987) – a 12-volume set – each volume highlights the art of a different society and culture. Foreign Language Editions (early ’80s) – Franklin also issued great books collections in German (The German Masterworks I & II) and Japanese (The Japanese Heirloom Library), mostly leather-bound or quarter-bound, but with a few Sturdite editions as well (possibly just prototypes).

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

Considered to be one of the more popular collections, the titles shown below were bound in genuine leather with 22k gold accents between 1974 to 1982.

This series was also published in the same quality paper starting in 1973, pre-dating the leather bound series, but using the faux leather or leatherette bindings decorated in gold/silver with printed design papers for the end-pages and gold on the edges of the pages of the book but without the ribbon bookmark. Some book titles were substituted with others. Books with this type of binding were published beyond 1986.

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 Pre Goriot by Honor 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 Bront

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront

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 Ren 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 Niccol 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 Molire

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

Adventures of 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 Bent

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 ntonia 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, Jr.

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

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

Adventures of 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

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 Bent

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 Honor 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 Bll

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 Franois 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)

Signature of Robert Penn Warren from the Signed Limited Edition of All the King’s Men

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 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 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 Men by Robert Penn Warren

Selected Poems (1923-1975) of Robert Penn Warren

The Optimist 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

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 Rey by Thornton 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.

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