The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series

What happened

By 1968 Ballantine Books had a problem most publishers would envy. Its authorized paperbacks of The Lord of the Rings, rushed out in 1965 in the wake of the Ace affair, had become a campus phenomenon (see "Frodo Lives!"), and readers were asking a simple question: what else is there like this? Ian and Betty Ballantine had already tested the waters with a handful of reprints branded "A Ballantine Adult Fantasy": The Hobbit in 1965, E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros in 1967, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books in 1968, and Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn in 1969.

To turn that experiment into a program they brought in Lin Carter, a New York writer, anthologist and tireless fan of pre-Tolkien fantasy who had just published Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings (1969). The series proper began in May 1969 with Fletcher Pratt's The Blue Star, and over the next five years Carter selected, introduced and often rescued from oblivion sixty-five titles. Each wore the same badge on its cover: a small Unicorn's Head colophon.

The list read like an archaeological dig through the fantasy tradition. June 1969 brought Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter; July, William Morris's The Wood Beyond the World, with The Well at the World's End following in two volumes in 1970. George MacDonald's Lilith (1969) and Phantastes (1970) returned the Victorian fantasist to print. Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist appeared in March 1970. Six novels by James Branch Cabell, Evangeline Walton's Welsh retellings beginning with The Island of the Mighty (1970), William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, and Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword (January 1971) joined them. From the pulps Carter pulled Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique and Hyperborea and H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, collecting fiction that had been scattered across Weird Tales for decades. Carter also edited eight anthologies for the line, among them Dragons, Elves, and Heroes and The Young Magicians (both 1969).

A few originals slipped in, most successfully Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Rising (1970), the start of a long-running series. But the line's heart was reprints. In 1973 Carter published Imaginary Worlds, a history of modern fantasy that doubled as a manifesto for his list. That same year Ballantine was sold to Random House, the Ballantines departed, and the series ended; its final title, Dunsany's Over the Hills and Far Away, appeared in April 1974.

Why it mattered

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series did something no publisher had done: it treated fantasy as a genre with a history. Before 1969, Dunsany, Morris, MacDonald and Eddison were library curiosities; after it, a teenager in a bus station could buy them for pocket money and see them as ancestors of Tolkien rather than oddities. Carter's introductions supplied the family tree. The line gave High / Epic Fantasy a lineage and gave the pulp traditions of Sword & Sorcery and Weird Fiction new respectability.

Its timing was crucial for games. The generation that designed Dungeons & Dragons and the early computer RPGs was reading paperbacks in exactly these years. Dunsany, Lovecraft, Anderson's The Broken Sword and Carter himself all appear in Gary Gygax's Appendix N reading list.

Legacy

Carter's taste was idiosyncratic and his editing sometimes heavy-handed, and critics have argued ever since about his choices. But the line's commercial lesson was absorbed immediately. After it ended, Ballantine kept publishing fantasy, now concentrating on new work, and in 1977 its science fiction and fantasy list was relaunched as Del Rey Books under Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey. Del Rey's first great fantasy success, Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara (1977), proved that original Tolkien-style epics could top bestseller lists.

The unicorn-head paperbacks remain prized by collectors, and their canon — Dunsany, Morris, Eddison, Mirrlees, Smith — is still the standard answer to the question of where fantasy came from before Middle-earth. That idea, that the genre has a deep past worth reading, is the whole premise of the Paperback Boom & the Counterculture and, in a sense, of this museum.