Collecting Franklin Library – The Oxford Great Book Series

As it is widely known, Franklin Library leather-bound books are an eye catcher. While there are an assortment of smaller series and finely bound titles created by Franklin Library, the most exclusive of their larger sets (and yes expensive) would be the 50 volumes of “The Oxford Library of the World’s Great Books,” otherwise known as the Oxford Great Books. This should NOT be confused with the most popular series known simply as, “The 100 Greatest Books of All Time” that was created from 1974-1982. As with other series, the half title page will tell you the important information on whether you have an “Oxford Great Book” from Franklin Library or one from their “100 Greatest Books” series.

Identifying Franklin Library Oxford Great Books

The volumes in this set comes in full premium leather with sewn-in ribbon bookmarks, satin endpapers and pastedowns, full gilt textblocks, and gilt tooling on the boards. The look and feel of an Oxford Great Book is what helps identify them, specifically each volume has a unique and distinctive cover relief design that is heavily illustrated.

An example of a volume from the Great Book series is shown below, “The Great Tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes.”

Complete List of the Franklin Library Great Books

Below is the complete list of “The Oxford Library of the World’s Great Books” by the Franklin Library:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) – Mark Twain
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
The Aeneid of Virgil – Translation of John Dryden
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Candide – Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire
Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
The Collected Poems of W B Yeats
Comedies – Moliere
The Confessions of Saint Augustine – Translation of Edward Bouverie Pusey
The Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio
The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
Don Quixote De La Mancha: The Ingenious Gentleman – Miguel de Cervantes
Faust: Parts One and Two – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Four Plays – Henrik Ibsen
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes
Greatest Comedies – William Shakespeare
Greatest Histories – William Shakespeare
Greatest Tragedies – William Shakespeare
Greatest Plays – Anton Chekhov
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel – Francois Rabelais
The Histories of Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
The Iliad – Homer
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Lord Jim: A Tale – Joseph Conrad
Madame Bovary: A Story of Provincial Life – Gustave Flaubert
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
Moby-Dick or The Whale – Herman Melville
The Odyssey – Homer
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Pere Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Poems – John Donne
The Portrait of A Lady – Henry James
Pride And Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Red and The Black – Stendhal
Romantic Poets: William Blake To Edgar Allan Poe
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Selected Essays – Michel de Montaigne
The Sound and Fury – William Faulkner
Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust
Tales Of Mystery – Edgar Allan Poe
Tess Of the D’urbervilles: A Pure Woman – Thomas Hardy
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Ulysses – James Joyce
Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero – William Makepeace Thackeray
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte