Ballantine Books

Ballantine Books was founded in 1952 by Ian and Betty Ballantine with a then-radical idea: publish original titles simultaneously in hardcover for bookstores and in a low-priced paperback for newsstands. The first title, Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite, proved the model. By February 1953 the paperback had sold 375,000 copies and the hardcover sold 22,000 in its first printing. Critics who predicted the cheap edition would cannibalize the hardcover were wrong; both formats grew.

From the start, Ballantine built a list that crossed genres. The early years produced science fiction (Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants), humor (Shel Silverstein's Grab Your Socks!), and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series edited by Lin Carter in 1969. In the mid-1970s the house published the Star Trek Logs novelizations and the Star Wars novelization, which sold 3.5 million copies in its first three months. Today the Ballantine Books Group, part of Random House and ultimately Bertelsmann, publishes a wide range of fiction and nonfiction under imprints including Bantam, Dell, and Delacorte.

Among its current authors are Andy Weir, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Jodi Picoult, and Isabel Allende. The house published J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings in paperback in the 1960s after a dispute with Ace Books over reprint rights, a rivalry Tolkien himself endorsed with a back-cover note urging readers to buy the Ballantine edition.

A reader choosing a Ballantine title can expect books selected for quality and wide appeal, spanning literary fiction, speculative fiction, nonfiction, and humor. The house has won the Locus Award for Best Publisher thirteen times, a record that underscores its particular strength on the science fiction and fantasy shelves.