Del Rey Books

History

Judy-Lynn Benjamin was a science fiction magazine editor when she married the veteran writer Lester del Rey in 1971. At Ballantine, which had just been sold to Random House, she revived the science fiction list and soon brought in Lester to edit fantasy. They were an unusual team: she was brisk, commercial and adored by authors (Philip K. Dick called her the best editor he had worked with); he was an opinionated old pulp hand with firm ideas about what readers wanted. Their success earned Judy-Lynn her own imprint, and in 1977 Ballantine launched Del Rey Books.

The del Reys believed that the readers who had made The Lord of the Rings a campus sensation in the 1960s would buy more of the same, if only someone would write it. They found their test case in a manuscript by an Illinois lawyer, Terry Brooks. The Sword of Shannara, heavily edited by Lester and dressed in cover and interior art by the Brothers Hildebrandt, painters of Ballantine's Tolkien calendars, was the first new novel Del Rey published. In 1977 it became the first fantasy novel on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list. The same year Lester took on Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane, reportedly after dozens of rejections elsewhere; the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, with their leprous, unwilling hero, were darker than anything Brooks wrote, and they sold too.

Del Rey spent the next decade proving the model. It published Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon (1978) and many later Pern books, and in 1982 began David Eddings's Belgariad, which Lester persuaded the author to issue as five volumes rather than three because booksellers balked at doorstops. Judy-Lynn meanwhile secured the novels of Star Wars, which earned the company millions and anchored a long-running line of tie-in fiction.

Judy-Lynn del Rey suffered a brain hemorrhage in October 1985 and died on February 20, 1986, at 43. She was voted the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor that year; Lester declined it, saying she would not have wanted an award given because she had died. He retired in 1992 and died the following year. The imprint continued under Random House, publishing R. A. Salvatore's DemonWars after he fell out with TSR, restored-text collections of Robert E. Howard, collections of H. P. Lovecraft, and, in recent years, fantasy and horror by Naomi Novik, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and many others.

Notable work

Del Rey's classic list reads like a syllabus of 1970s and 1980s epic fantasy: Shannara, Covenant, the Belgariad and its sequels, Pern, and Barbara Hambly, Katherine Kurtz and Piers Anthony's Xanth. Its science fiction ran from Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl to Star Wars.

Legacy

Critics have often been hard on the Del Rey formula, the long quest series written for readers who had finished Tolkien and wanted more. But its commercial logic changed publishing, and it changed games as well. The readers raised on Shannara and the Belgariad were the players who filled Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms shelves, and the model of the numbered, map-fronted series that runs for decades begins, in large part, here.