When I first started visiting rare book shows, back in the 1980s, I was told by many a dealer not to bother collecting the editions put out by The Franklin Library, a division of The Franklin Mint. Founded in 1964, in Wawa, Pennsylvania, The Franklin Mint produces all sorts of collectibles and commemorative items – gold and silver coins, plates, knives, dolls, model automobiles, and so forth. Beginning in 1973, Franklin also began to produce collectible books under the Franklin Library label, which they sold via monthly subscriptions, somewhat like the Book of the Month Club or the Library of America. This series, called The 100 Greatest Books of All Time, consisted entirely of classics – The Aeneid by Virgil, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, Voltaire’s Candide, The Analects of Confucius, and so forth. I had no difficulty resisting these, because many were older translations that had been long ago deemed outmoded. But even those written in English – like David Copperfield or Jane Eyre – struck me as less than ideal. I preferred my classics to come from Penguin or the Oxford University Press, with plenty of annotations and ancillary information (author bios, scholarly intros, etc.). Later the company produced other series of books, including the Franklin Library of Pulitzer Prize Classics, The Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century, 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature, and the Collected Stories of the World’s Greatest Writers series. I liked the look and feel of these books and often lingered over them in used-book stores, but my inner snob wouldn’t allow me to purchase a book from a company that also produced collectible dolls and pocketknives. I had allowed a handful of snooty rare-book dealers to convince me that these were not serious artifacts of the book publishing trade.
UNYELLOWED BY TIME
UNYELLOWED BY TIME
UNYELLOWED BY TIME
When I first started visiting rare book shows, back in the 1980s, I was told by many a dealer not to bother collecting the editions put out by The Franklin Library, a division of The Franklin Mint. Founded in 1964, in Wawa, Pennsylvania, The Franklin Mint produces all sorts of collectibles and commemorative items – gold and silver coins, plates, knives, dolls, model automobiles, and so forth. Beginning in 1973, Franklin also began to produce collectible books under the Franklin Library label, which they sold via monthly subscriptions, somewhat like the Book of the Month Club or the Library of America. This series, called The 100 Greatest Books of All Time, consisted entirely of classics – The Aeneid by Virgil, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, Voltaire’s Candide, The Analects of Confucius, and so forth. I had no difficulty resisting these, because many were older translations that had been long ago deemed outmoded. But even those written in English – like David Copperfield or Jane Eyre – struck me as less than ideal. I preferred my classics to come from Penguin or the Oxford University Press, with plenty of annotations and ancillary information (author bios, scholarly intros, etc.). Later the company produced other series of books, including the Franklin Library of Pulitzer Prize Classics, The Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century, 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature, and the Collected Stories of the World’s Greatest Writers series. I liked the look and feel of these books and often lingered over them in used-book stores, but my inner snob wouldn’t allow me to purchase a book from a company that also produced collectible dolls and pocketknives. I had allowed a handful of snooty rare-book dealers to convince me that these were not serious artifacts of the book publishing trade.