Tor Books

History

Tom Doherty was a book salesman who became publisher of Ace in the 1970s. Frustrated under new management there, he set out on his own: Tom Doherty Associates was formed in 1979, with investment from Richard Gallen, and its first imprint, Tor Books, followed in 1980. Two Ace colleagues came with him as the editorial staff: Harriet McDougal and Jim Baen, who would later leave to found Baen Books. The first Tor book appeared in November 1980. The name means a rocky hilltop, pictured in the logo.

The early list mixed science fiction, fantasy, horror and tie-ins. After John Milius's 1982 film revived interest in Conan, Doherty acquired rights to new Conan novels, and McDougal recommended a Charleston writer she knew, James Oliver Rigney Jr., who wrote seven of them as Robert Jordan between 1982 and 1984. Tor's first great success was science fiction: Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (1985) won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Tor also dabbled in games, publishing Greg Costikyan's The Willow Game (1988), a board game of the Willow film.

The decisive bet was Jordan's own fantasy. Doherty signed him to a six-book contract in 1984. The Eye of the World, the first volume of The Wheel of Time, was published on January 15, 1990, as a large-format paperback, supported by thousands of advance copies and about a million free samples of the opening chapters. It worked. The series grew to fourteen novels and a prequel, reached the top of bestseller lists, and set the scale for the 1990s "doorstopper." McDougal, Jordan's editor and wife, guided it throughout. After Jordan died in 2007, Doherty passed her a copy of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, and Sanderson finished the cycle with A Memory of Light (2013).

Tor had meanwhile become a powerhouse. It was sold to St. Martin's Press in 1987 and so became part of Holtzbrinck's Macmillan group. It added imprints such as Forge, Orb, Starscape and Tor Teen, launched the Tor.com website in July 2008, and won the Locus Award for best publisher every year from 1988 to 2024. It published Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen in the United States, Sanderson's Elantris (2005), Mistborn (2006) and The Stormlight Archive (2010), and Ed Greenwood's Band of Four novels. In 2012 it dropped digital rights management from its ebooks. In 2019 Tor and other Macmillan imprints moved from the Flatiron Building to the Equitable Building in Manhattan, and in 2022 Tom Doherty Associates was renamed Tor Publishing Group. Doherty remained its chairman emeritus into the mid-2020s.

Notable work

The Wheel of Time and Sanderson's Cosmere define Tor's fantasy list, alongside the American Malazan, Terry Goodkind, Jacqueline Carey, Gene Wolfe, Steven Brust and John Scalzi's science fiction. Tordotcom Publishing revived the novella as a commercial form in the 2010s.

Legacy

Tor finished what Del Rey began. Where Del Rey proved that Tolkien's readers wanted more, Tor proved they would follow a single story across two decades and ten thousand pages. The scale of those series, with their magic systems explained almost as rules, their glossaries and their maps, made them natural neighbors to roleplaying games, and Sanderson's worlds have since been adapted into a crowdfunded tabletop RPG. For many readers of the 1990s and 2000s, the Tor mountain on the spine simply meant fantasy.