Collecting Franklin Library – The 100 Greatest Books of All Time Series

Praised for their decorative fine leather-bound books, Franklin Library offered several stunning series for book collectors built specifically for the home library. The most basic of these series is known simply as, “The 100 Greatest Books of All Time” and was created from 1974-1982. By simply flipping through the first few pages of a Franklin Library volume, you can identify the series that the book belongs to and more often than not, it will be a book from the 100 Greatest.

Identifying Franklin Library

When purchasing Franklin Library books, a buyer should be aware that there are three types of Franklin Library volumes of differing quality: 1/4 Leather bound book, a faux leather with a cloth like appearance, and a full leather set with sewn-in ribbon bookmarks. The full leather volumes also have satin endpapers and pastedowns, gilt textblocks, and gilt tooling on the boards. Any of the Franklin Library editions make for terrific gifts and while typically not used for more than decoration, they can be read without too much paranoia as to their collectability; this must be within reason as some of the better series books and unique titles can be quite expensive in today’s market! Obviously, the full leather is the most desirable and the one you should keep an eye out for so that you are purchasing the higher quality book for the sake of longevity.

Typically, you will find an insert known as the “Notes from the Editors” and while not essential to the volume, having that extra pamphlet completes the book and similarly the bookset (i.e. 100 Greatest Leather Bound volumes and 100 Notes from the Editors to accompany the books).

Complete List of the Franklin Library 100 Greatest

Below is the complete list of “The 100 Greatest Books of All Time Series” by the Franklin Library:

A Farewell to Arms (1979) – Ernest Hemingway
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1975) – Lewis Carroll
Candide (1978) – Voltaire
Canterbury Tales (1974) – Geoffrey Chaucer
Collected Poems 1909 to 1962 (1976) – T. S. Eliot
Crime and Punishment (1975) – Feodor Dostoevsky
David Copperfield (1976) – Charles Dickens
Don Quixote De La Mancha (1976) – Cervantes
Eight Comedies (1978) – William Shakespeare
Eight Plays (1976) – Anton Chekhov
Essay (1981) – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays (1980) – Michel De Montaigne
Essays (1982) – Sir Francis Bacon
Fairy Tales (1982) – Hans Christian Andersen
Fathers and Sons (1981) – Ivan Turgenev
Faust (1979) – Goethe
Favorite Household Tales (1981) – The Brothers Grimm
Five Comedies (1982) – Aristophanes
Five Stories (1977) – Thomas Mann
Four Plays (1978) – Eugene O’Neill
Great Expectations (1982) – Charles Dickens
Gulliver’s Travels (1974) – Jonathan Swift
Jane Eyre (1981) – Charlotte Bronte
Laurence Sterne (1980) – Tristam Shandy
Leaves of Grass (1981) – Walt Whitman
Lord Jim (1977) – Joseph Conrad
Lyrical Ballads (1982) – William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Madame Bovary (1978) – Gustave Flaubert
Moby Dick (1974) – Herman Melville
Molly Flanders (1978) – Daniel Defoe
Nana (1981) – Emile Zola
Nine Plays (1976) – Euripides
Nine Tales (1977) – Henry James
Oresteia (1980) – Aeschylus
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Pensees (1979) – Blaise Pascal
Pere Goriot (1977) – Honore De Balzac
Philosophical Works (1981) – Rene Descartes
Poems (1978) – John Donne
Poems (1980) – William Shakespeare
Poems of John Keats (1982)
Political Works (1982) – Jean Jacques Rousseau
Political Writing (1982) – John Stuart Mill
Political Writings (1978) – Thomas Paine
Politics (1977) – Aristotle
Pride and Prejudice (1980) – Jane Austen
Robinson Crusoe (1977) – Daniel Defoe
Satyricon (1980) – Petronius
Selected Poems (1979) – William Butler Yeats
Seven Plays (1980) – Moliere
Six Histories (1981) – William Shakespeare
Six Plays (1977) – Henrik Ibsen
Six Tragedies (1975) – William Shakespeare
Six Tragedies (1982) – Jean Racine
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1980) – William Blake
Stories (1980) – Guy De Maupassant
Swann’s Way (1982) – Marcel Proust
Tales from The Arabian Nights (1977) – Sir Richard F. Burton
Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1974)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1975) – Mark Twain
The Aeneid (1975) – Virgil
The Ambassadors (1980) – Henry James
The Analects of Confucius (1980)
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1979)
The Basic Works of Sigmund Freud (1978)
The Confessions of Saint Augustine (1976)
The Decameron (1979) – Giovanni Boccaccio
The Divine Comedy (1977) – Dante Alighieri
The Education of Henry Adams (1982) – Henry Adams
The Federalist (1977) – Hamilton Jay Madison
The Flowers of Evil (1977) – Charles Baudelaire
The Great Gatsby (1974) – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1978) – Francois Rabelais
The History of the Peloponnesian War (1980) – Thucydides
The Iliad (1975) – Homer
The Last of the Mohicans (1979) – James Fenimore Cooper
The Mill on the Floss (1982) – George Eliot
The Odyssey (1976) – Homer
The Origin of Species (1975) – Charles Darwin
The Pilgrim’s Progress (1976) – John Bunyan
The Poetry of Robert Frost (1979)
The Prince (1978) – Machiavelli
The Red and the Black (1979) – Stendhal
The Red Badge of Courage (1979) – Stephen Crane
The Republic (1975) – Plato
The Return of the Native (1978) – Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter (1978) – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Sound and the Fury (1976) – William Faulkner
The Tragedies of Sophocles (1981)
The Trial (1977) – Franz Kafka
Three Plays (1979) – Bernard Shaw
Tom Jones (1979) – Henry Fielding
Treasure Island (1975) – Robert Louis Stevenson
Twelve Illustrious Lives (1981) – Plutarch
Ulysses (1976) – James Joyce
Vanity Fair (1977) – William Makepeace Thackeray
Walden (1976) – Henry D. Thoreau
War and Peace (1981) – Leo Tolstoy
Women in Love (1979) – D. H. Lawrence
Wuthering Heights (1975) – Emily Bronte