C F Braun & Co

Can anyone tell me anything about C F Braun & Co of Alhambra California? I recently acquired a copy of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow with Rackham illustrations printed in 1959. It is bound in quarter leather with marbled boards. It seems to be a very nicely bound and printed.

A large international engineering and construction company. Its founder, Carl Braun was known to be multi-talented: an engineer, a salesman, a bibliophile, a teacher and an author. The Rare Book Room at Occidental College is named after him. The company had an in-house publishing arm that printed engineering/business books, as well as literature (often in facsimile).

https://reallivingimages.fnistools.com/Uploads/Teams/413480/ContentFiles/2014aug...

https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8jd5350/entire_text/

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-los-angeles-times-founder-of-c-f-bra/3463...

From one of my earlier posts:

THE PRIVATE PRESS OF C. F. BRAUN
C. F. Braun & Co. was a large international petrochemical engineering company located in Alhambra, CA. The company was founded by Carl Franklin Braun in 1909. He was a reader, among other things, and the company published limited edition books for its employees and customers. They were nicely printed and bound, often in quarter leather over marbled boards. I own a copy of their edition of Prosper Merimee's Colomba (1958). This would be a nice series to collect. Some volumes were basically reprints of Limited Editions Club books, such as Pierre Loti's An Iceland Fisherman (1957).

>2 dpbbooks: Thank you for your informative post. Do you know of a list of the literature he published?

>3 Glacierman: Thank you also. I would like to collect these books. Do you know of a list of his books?

>5 jfkf: I just did a search for "C. F. Braun" on ViaLibri, but you get his technical works, too. There's some interesting stuff in there.

Don't have or know of a complete list, but here are a few of the arts and literature selections that C. F. Braun & Co. printed that I am aware of. As Glacierman notes, many of these are facsimile reprints. In addition, Carl F. Braun sometimes wrote the introduction or forward to these editions. I believe most were published in an edition of 1000. There are also many management and construction related titles that I have not included.

Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1979)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The One Hoss Shay (1978)
Ernest Thayer, Casey at the Bat (1977)
Charles Dickens, Christmas with Mr. Pickwick (1977)
Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle (1972)
Currier & Ives (1971)
Ernest Seaton-Thompson, The Trail of the Sandhill Stag (1969)
Laurence Hope, The Garden of Kama: and Other Love Lyrics from India (1968)
Robert W. Service, The Spell of Yukon and Other Verses (1967)
Victor Hugo, So This Then is the Battle of Waterloo (1966)
Howard Pyle, The Ruby of Kishmoor (1965)
John G. Braun, Charles M Russell Pen Sketches (1964)
John G. Braun, Frederic Remington: Paintings and Drawings of the Old West (1963)
Edgar M. Queeny, Prairie Wings: Pen and Camera Flight Studies (1962)
Sarah Catherine Martin, The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her dog (1962)(with Huntington Library)
William Hertich, Palms and Cycads: Their Culture in Southern California (1960)
Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1959)
Oscar James Campbell, Comical Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1959)
Prosper Mérimée, Colomba (1958)
Pierre Loti, An Iceland Fisherman (1957)
Henry Van Dyke, Two Stories: The First Christmas Tree; The Story of the Other Wise Man (1956)
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Bottle Imp (1955) (designed by Ward Ritchie)
John E. Pomfret, Ten Americans Speak: Facsimiles of Original Editions Selected and Annotated (1954)
Lafcadio Hearn, Chita: A Memory OF Last Island (1952)
Lafcadio Hearn, Youma: The Story of a West Indian Slave (1952)
David Starr Jordan, The Fate of Iciodorum, Being the Story of a City Made Rich By Taxation (1950)
Francis Lord Verulam (Francis Bacon), Novum Organum or True Suggestions for the Interpretation of Nature (1949)
Cinderella: Or, the History of the Little Glass Slipper (n.d.)

In addition, Carl F. Braun wrote Two Hundred Good Books: A List And Reviews in 1949 as one of a series of books "for the intellectual development of his employees".

In addition, there are also a few books (mostly Western American history) that C. F. Braun & Co. reprinted photolithographically for the Huntington Library.

>7 dpbbooks: Good work! Handy little checklist for future reference. Ought to pin this one.

I have the Prosper Mérimée book and just ordered The One Hoss Shay. There are several others on that list that tempt me.

I have copies of:

The Bottle Imp — beautiful little book in quarter leather over marbled paper sides with nice illustrations.

Novum Organum — decent facsimile, but not letterpress printed, so far as I can see.

Rip Van Winkle — very nice paper and printing, except that my copy is defective, with some pages seemingly having gone through the press twice with imperfect registration.

>9 kermaier: I believe many of the facsimile reprints were done by "A Photolithographic Facsimile by the Private Press of C.F. Braun & Co. Alhambra, California", as indicated in the colophon of Cinderella.

They're nice books overall, but put 'em in the quality press category.

Just received that copy of Oliver Wendel Holmes' The One Hoss Shay with Howard Pyle's illustrations. It is a full on facsimile reprint of the 1909 edition issued in 1973. My copy is in excellent shape and is a very nice little book.