Bantam

Bantam Books began in New York in 1945. Walter B. Pitkin Jr., Sidney B. Kramer and the married pair Ian and Betty Ballantine started it as a paperback house, with money from Grosset & Dunlap and the Curtis Publishing Company. Ownership then changed several times. National General and Carl Lindner's American Financial both held it, and in 1986 Bertelsmann bought the Bantam Doubleday Dell group. Once Bertelsmann had taken over Random House in 1998, Bantam and Dell were merged in 1999 as Bantam Dell. In 2010 that group was joined with Ballantine Books, the house Ian and Betty Ballantine founded in 1952. Bantam today is an imprint of Random House, which belongs to Penguin Random House.

The early business was cheap paperback reprints of hardcover books, with some paperback originals. Over time Bantam added trade paperbacks and hardcovers, many of them later reissued in its own mass-market editions. Under Oscar Dystel, whose management made Bantam a leading mass-market publisher, it issued paperback editions of The Catcher in the Rye, Jaws and Ragtime. It also had a strong pop-culture streak. It was the first publisher licensed to produce original Star Trek novels and episode adaptations, from the late 1960s until the licence moved to Pocket Books in 1979. It first published the children's series Choose Your Own Adventure, and in the 1990s it issued a dozen original Indiana Jones novels.

James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small is one of its paperbacks. Herriot was the pen name of Alf Wight, an English vet, and the book gathers stories of rural veterinary work and country life in Yorkshire. Retailer listings show Bantam mass-market editions running from the 1970s into the 1980s, and the 1974 printing runs to 499 pages.

The list around it is broad. Reference sources name Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Jean Auel, John Grisham and Robert Ludlum among its authors. Crime writers such as Elizabeth George and Tami Hoag have also published with the house. Science fiction and fantasy have long had their own strand through Spectra.

Expect books made for a wide audience: plots that move, familiar genres and a paperback you can read on a bus. Bantam is a mainstream commercial imprint, not a literary specialist.