George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd. (London, UK)
Series dates: 1909-1947
Size: 5″ x 7″
Updates 2/23/2025
The Harrap Library was a carefully designed series of reprints mixed with edited collections of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Early copies have various “deluxe” bindings in leather, faux leather, sheepskin, and other materials. Care was taken with the design of the books, jackets, and typography used in the series: “The Type chosen is of heavy face, specially made from a new design for the Harrap Library. It is very legible, and will not tire the eyes of the reader even after a lengthy spell. The Paper is manufactured from rag…” (From British Books in Print, Volume 5, 1910).
It’s not clear if the early titles in the series with their gift bindings had jackets or boxes. by the early 1920s, the books were being issued in more traditional cloth buckram bindings with a common jacket design. The copy of Goldsmith’s Essays (selected by A.H. Sleight) below illustrates the 1920s-style jacket for the series. This is the 1925 first printing of this title. Information unique to each title is printed in red. An illustration of a used bookstore graces the jacket spine, a reader (maybe in that store) the jacket front. The illustration is by W.M. Geddes, aka Wilhelmina Geddes, an Irish artist best known for her stained glass work. Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is also included on the jacket front (and in the book). The front jacket flap is blank.
The rear of the jacket features additional Harrap Library volumes, collections of humor, essays, short stories, and plays. The price of the books is 3s./6d. The rear jacket flap is blank.
Khaki cloth buckram covers include an arts and crafts-inspired design.
The half-title page:
The reverse of the half-title page includes a list of 27 titles:
An illustration of Goldsmith faces the title page.
The copyright page includes the year of printing (1925) and printer information.
In 1925 or 1926 the series jackets were redesigned. The new abstract, patterned design is seen on this June 1926 (first in series, June 1925) copy of The Lure of the Sea selected by F.H. Lee. This particular jacket and book design are found on most series titles in the last two decades of the series. The jacket design is similar to Harrap’s Novels Beautiful series and the same designer probably is responsible for both series jacket designs. Roughly similar repeating geometric patterns also show up on the Zodiac Books series and, after the war, The Novel Library, both inspired by the design of Curwen Press books.
The jackets are minimalist, besides the pattern, common to the series (varying in the colors used to print the patterns), and include only the book title, publisher, and series name (on the bottom front of the jacket). The jacket flaps are blank, except for the price (clipped in this case).
The pattern continues onto the rear of the jacket. No text is included at all on the rear of the jacket or rear flap.
Bindings are basic cloth-like boards (“clothette”) with gold printing on the spine and a debossed design on the front of the book. The debossed design on the front of the book follows from the books with the earlier jacket designs.
Facing the half-title page is a list of the first 39 titles in the series. The offset design of the half-title page belies some devotion to contemporary modernist book design.
An image related to the book faces the title page, which is also offset. It also includes a red Cogito Ergo Sum design element (“I think, therefore I am”).
The copyright page includes the month and year of the first publication as well as the subsequent printing month and year.
A list of titles in the Harrap Library series is below. As is common, the series gets a bit sloppy at the end, with some dates of publication that don’t quite make sense (and may be due to including the year of original publication), and a few titles that are in (or may be in) the series, but don’t seem to have a series number. The count as it stands, is 58 numbered titles, and at least 1 unnumbered title, with 2 additional possible titles.
1. Emerson’s Essays, First Series
2. Emerson’s Essays, Second Series
3. The Poetry Of Earth
4. Paradise Lost
5. The Essays Of Elia
6. The Thoughts Of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
7. Representative Men, R.W. Emerson
8. English Traits, R.W. Emerson
9. Last Essays Of Elia
10. Paradise Regained and Minor Poems
11. Sartor Resartus
12. The Book Of Epictetus
13. The Conduct of Life, R.W. Emerson
14. Nature: Addresses And Lectures, R.W. Emerson
15. The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century
16. Day-Dreams Of A Schoolmaster
17. On Heroes And Hero-Worship
18. Tales In Prose And Verse, by Bret Hart
19. Leaves Of Grass
20. Hazlitt’s Essays
21. Karma And Other Essays
22. The Golden Book of English Sonnets
23. Readings From The Bible
24. Essays Of To-Day
25. Short Stories Of To-Day
26. Michael Field
27. One-Act Plays Of To-Day, Series I
28. A Anthology Of Humorous Verse
29. English Seamen In The Sixteenth Century
30. Great Englishmen Of The Sixteenth Century
31. The Lure Of The Sea
32. Boswell’s Life Of Johnson
33. Bygone England
34. Narrative Essays and Sketches
35. Goldsmith’s Essays
36. One-Act Plays of To-Day, Series II
37. A Treasury of Verse
38. Letters of Horace Walpole
39. One-Act Plays of To-Day, Series III
40. The Diary of Mr Pepys
41. Humour of To-Day
42. Selections from English Dramatists
43. Poets of the Romantic Revival
44. Essays of Yesterday
45. A London Anthology
46. The Lure of the Hills
47. More Essays of To-Day
48. Nineteenth-Century Life
49. One-Act Plays of To-Day, Series IV
50. Short Stories of Yesterday
51. Longer English Poems
52. One-Act Plays of To-Day, Series V (1936)
53. The Ecstasies of Thomas De Quincey
54. Readings From Modern Science (1932)
55. Dante and his Poetry (1932)
56. One-Act Plays of To-Day, Series VI (1936)
57. United States and United Kingdom: Comparisons, contrasts and Similarities in English and American Life and Literature: An Anthology (1944)
58. The Twentieth-Century Drama (1946)
*#?. The English Essay, by A.J. Merson (1939)
**#?. The English Novel: An Anthology of English Prose, Fiction, ed. by John Maddison and Kenneth Garwood (1938)
**#?. Ten Selected One-Act Plays, ed. by Max Haydn Fuller (1944)
*Issued in Harrap’s Modern English Series, but at least one entry in WorldCat indicates Harrap Library series and copies of this title with a Harrap Library dust jacket can be found on Amazon.com and eBay. Thus it’s an unnumbered series title.
**Issued in Harrap’s Modern English Series, but at least one entry in WorldCat indicates Harrap Library series. As with the Merson title, these may have also been issued in the Harrap Library but I can find no actual evidence for this besides the WorldCat entries.
The Harrap Library name was reused in the 1960s in a paperback series published in cooperation with Corgi Books.
