Bantam Books

Bantam Books started in 1945 as an American paperback house. Its founders were Walter B. Pitkin Jr., Sidney B. Kramer and the married couple Ian and Betty Ballantine, backed by money from Grosset & Dunlap and the Curtis Publishing Company. The model was to bring hardcover successes back as cheap pocket editions. Ian Ballantine was its first president, but he left in 1952 to start Ballantine Books. He wanted to publish paperback originals, and Bantam's list was almost entirely reprints.

The house grew into one of the dominant mass-market paperback publishers of the 1960s and 1970s, then added trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Ownership changed often. Bertelsmann already controlled Bantam when it bought Doubleday in 1986. Bantam merged with Dell in 1999 to form Bantam Dell, that group was combined with Ballantine in 2010, and by 2015 Bantam was a stand-alone imprint again. Today it sits inside Random House, part of Penguin Random House.

The range is wide. Mysteries and westerns filled much of the paperback era, and a science fiction and fantasy line took off in the 1980s. The Bantam Spectra imprint, launched in 1985, brought in writers such as William Gibson, Connie Willis and Karen Joy Fowler. Bantam also issued the original run of the Choose Your Own Adventure children's series, and between 1970 and 1982 it published about a dozen of the first original Star Trek novels.

Agatha Christie belongs to the older part of the story. Bantam was selling her paperbacks in the United States by the 1960s, and in 1983 it brought out The Agatha Christie Mystery Collection, a matching run of small hardcovers. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the Hercule Poirot novel first published in 1926, was part of that series. A Bantam copy is a reissue of a long-established classic, not a new text.

Readers can expect mainstream storytelling from this imprint: plot-driven fiction made for a broad audience, in genres where a reliable page-turner matters most.