Ballantine Books

History

Ian Ballantine was a paperback evangelist. He had run the American branch of Penguin and in 1945 co-founded Bantam Books; in 1952 he and his wife, Betty, started a house of their own in New York with a new idea. Rather than reprint hardcovers years later, Ballantine offered publishers simultaneous editions: a hardcover for bookstores and a cheap paperback for newsstands. The first title, Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite, came out as a $3.00 Houghton Mifflin hardcover and a 35-cent Ballantine paperback, and the paperback sold hundreds of thousands of copies without hurting the hardcover.

Science fiction became a house specialty almost at once. Ballantine published Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and the original anthology series Star Science Fiction Stories, often behind Richard Powers's abstract covers. Through the 1950s and 1960s Ballantine and Ace were the two dominant American science fiction paperback lines.

The rivalry came to a head in 1965. Ace, believing that Tolkien's American copyright had lapsed, issued an unauthorized 75-cent Lord of the Rings. Ballantine, which had been negotiating with Houghton Mifflin, rushed out an authorized Hobbit and then, from October 1965, a 95-cent Lord of the Rings in Tolkien's revised text. Its back covers carried a note from the author asking readers to buy that edition and no other. Betty Ballantine recalled that fans and the press rallied behind them; Ace agreed to pay royalties, and the Ballantine edition topped the New York Times paperback list in December 1966 (see The Ace Paperback Affair and "Frodo Lives!").

Ballantine then built a genre on that success. It published "adult fantasy" precursors such as The Worm Ouroboros (1967), Gormenghast (1968) and The Last Unicorn (1969), and in 1969 launched the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series series under editor Lin Carter, which reprinted Lord Dunsany, William Morris, Clark Ashton Smith, George MacDonald and James Branch Cabell under a unicorn's-head colophon. Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight (1968) began Pern at Ballantine, and the house's Tolkien calendars, painted by the Brothers Hildebrandt in the mid-1970s, fixed the look of Middle-earth for a generation.

The Ballantines sold the company to Random House in 1973 and left soon after. The new regime brought in Judy-Lynn del Rey to revive the science fiction list and her husband, Lester, to run fantasy. Judy-Lynn secured the 1976 Star Wars novelization, which sold 3.5 million copies in three months, and in 1977 the couple's work became a new imprint, Del Rey Books. Random House passed to Bertelsmann in 1998 and into Penguin Random House in 2013; Ballantine continues as one of its core imprints.

Notable work

Ballantine's fantasy legacy is the authorized American Tolkien of the 1960s and 1970s, the Adult Fantasy series with its Lin Carter introductions, Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Rising (1970), the first Pern novels, and the Hildebrandt calendars. It has also long published Terry Brooks, McCaffrey and many others through Del Rey.

Legacy

Ballantine did more than any other American house to make fantasy a shelf category. Its Tolkien paperbacks put The Lord of the Rings in campus bookstores during the counterculture years, and Carter's reprints gave readers older writers such as Dunsany and Lovecraft, both of whom Gygax would later list in Appendix N. The demand it proved in the 1960s is the demand that its own Del Rey imprint, and the games that followed, set out to feed.