Ballantine Books

• 1. Introduction

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  Ballantine Books opened for business in 1952 with a claim its founder, Ian Ballantine, put in blunt commercial terms. He promised to "offer trade publishers a plan for simultaneous publishing of original titles in two editions, a hardcover 'regular' edition for bookstore sale, and a paper-cover, 'newsstand' size, low-priced edition for mass market sale." Ballantine ran the new firm with his wife, Betty Ballantine. Together they bet that readers would buy the same new book twice: once expensive, once cheap, released the same day. Ian had already helped found Bantam Books before striking out on his own. What followed tested whether that bet actually worked. It also drew Ballantine into a public fight with a rival paperback house over the rights to a famous fantasy trilogy. Eventually, the two-person publishing experiment became part of one of the largest media companies in the world.

• 2. The Paperback Gamble

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  Fawcett Publications forced a reckoning in 1950 when its Gold Medal line began selling paperback originals instead of reprints of already-published hardcovers. Lion Books, Avon and Ace all followed Fawcett into original paperback publishing soon after. Ballantine's twist was to release a new title in both hardcover and paperback on the same day rather than choosing one format. Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite became the proving ground for that idea when it appeared in 1952 as Ballantine's first book. Houghton Mifflin published the hardcover at $3.00 while Ballantine sold its paperback edition for 35 cents. By February of 1953, Ballantine had sold 375,000 copies of Executive Suite and was preparing to print 100,000 more. Houghton Mifflin, by comparison, sold 22,000 hardback copies in its first printing. Ballantine's total sales soon reached 470,000 copies. Some in the industry had predicted the cheap paperback would cannibalize hardcover sales. Instead, the paperback edition gave Executive Suite more publicity and helped both editions sell. MGM bought the film rights, and Robert Wise directed the resulting 1954 film, which received four Academy Award nominations. Ballantine followed Executive Suite with a run of numbered titles that filled spinner racks nationwide. Hal Ellson's The Golden Spike came in at number two, followed by Stanley Baron's All My Enemies at number three. Luke Short's Saddle by Starlight took the fourth spot, and Ruth Park's The Witch's Thorn followed at number five. Emile Danoen's Tides of Tide filled number six, ahead of Frank Bonham's Blood on the Land at number seven. Al Capp's The World of Li'l Abner took number eight, and LaSelle Gilman's The Red Gate rounded out the list at number nine. That ninth title closed out Ballantine's opening run of general fiction. The next expansion would come from a very different shelf in the bookstore.

• 3. Winning The Tolkien War

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  The Space Merchants, catalogued as Ballantine title number 21, opened the publisher's run into science fiction and fantasy during the early 1950s. Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth wrote the novel, which had first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction under the title Gravy Planet. Editor Stanley Kauffmann then acquired Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a novel that had also begun life in Galaxy as a shorter piece called "The Firemen." Ballantine's science fiction list also carried Star Science Fiction Stories, an anthology series unusual for offering new fiction rather than reprints. Richard Powers painted its covers, and Frederik Pohl edited the series, blending the feel of a magazine with the format of a paperback. A rivalry with Ace Books defined the early 1960s for Ballantine's genre publishing. The two houses competed for the paperback rights to the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ballantine won the fight for Tolkien. Its editions of The Lord of the Rings carried a back cover message from Tolkien urging readers to buy Ballantine's version and boycott "unauthorized editions." A separate Canadian edition of the trilogy used different front cover artwork. Tolkien had asked for permission to add that back cover message, and Ballantine granted it. Betty Ballantine later described the reaction: "And we did put a little statement on the back covers saying that Ace was not paying royalties to Professor Tolkien, and everybody who admired Lord of the Rings should only buy our paperback edition. Well, everybody got behind us. There was literally no publication that did not carry some kind of outraged article. And of course, the whole science fiction fraternity got behind the book; this was their meat and drink." That fraternity of readers would keep buying Ballantine's genre titles well beyond the Tolkien dispute.

• 4. Licensing The Future

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  In 1969, Lin Carter began editing the new Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which returned a number of rare older titles to print. The same series launched Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels. During the mid-1970s, Ballantine issued the Star Trek Logs, a ten-volume set of Alan Dean Foster's adaptations of the animated Star Trek series. Ballantine had already entered Star Trek publishing in 1968 with The Making of Star Trek, a non-fiction book by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. In 1976, Ballantine published Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, credited to George Lucas but ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster. The novelization reached shelves ahead of the film itself, which followed the next year. Both the book and the film became enormous successes, and the novelization sold out its initial print run. In its first three months alone, Ballantine sold 3.5 million copies of the Star Wars book. Ballantine's genre publishing also brought recognition at industry ceremonies. The company won the inaugural Locus Award for Best Publisher, and 12 more Locus wins followed over the years. Ballantine would carry that same instinct for licensed material from bookstores into comic strips and stand-up humor collections next.

• 5. Cartoons And Contrarians

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  Shel Silverstein joined Ballantine's list in 1956 with Grab Your Socks!, a collection of his cartoons drawn for Pacific Stars and Stripes. Editor Bernard Shir-Cliff shaped much of Ballantine's humor and comics output through the 1950s and 1960s. He handled the Zacherley anthologies, the paperback edition of Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels, and Harvey Kurtzman's The Mad Reader along with other early Mad paperbacks. Shir-Cliff also contributed four pieces of his own to Mad and other magazines edited by Kurtzman. In 1956, he edited a humor anthology for Ballantine called The Wild Reader. It gathered essays, poems and satirical pieces from Robert Benchley, Art Buchwald, Tom Lehrer and John Lardner. Contributors also included Shepherd Mead, Ogden Nash, S. J. Perelman, Frank Sullivan, James Thurber and others. The 154-page paperback carried cartoons by Kelly Freas, who also drew its front cover. Cartoonist and author Roger Price contributed to both Ballantine and Kurtzman's magazines, and he wrote two humor books for the press. I'm for Me First, published in 1954, follows Herman Clabbercutt's scheme to launch a political party called the "I'm for Me First" Party. In One Head and Out the Other, also from 1954, popularized the catchphrase "I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there." Science fiction fandom picked up that nonsense phrase almost immediately, and it kept surfacing in fanzines, a use noted in Fancyclopedia II in 1959. Since 1980, Ballantine has published books built around Jim Davis' comic strip Garfield. The publisher's own identity, though, kept shifting alongside its catalogue.

• 6. A Changing Emblem

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  Ballantine's original logo paired two mirrored letter Bs set back to back. That mark later changed to two Bs stacked together, forming an elaborate gate design. Random House acquired Ballantine in 1973. Bertelsmann, a German media conglomerate, bought Random House in 1998, and Ballantine has remained part of Bertelsmann ever since. The Ballantine name today spans several imprints, including Del Rey, Fawcett, One World and Presidio Press. Del Rey continues the science fiction and fantasy tradition Ballantine built decades earlier, while Presidio Press carries the catalogue into military history.