Pioneer of publishing brought the paperback revolution to the United States

In today’s world of ebooks and internet publishing, it is hard to imagine a time when a battle raged between supporters of hardback and paperback books. In 1935 Allen Lane set up the Penguin imprint in Britain to make good-quality fiction and nonfiction available in paperback at sixpence a copy, selling more than three million books in his first full year.

Four years later Betty Ballantine, a young British woman, set sail with her husband of one day from Southampton to New York, dodging U-boats and armed with a contract from Lane to establish a US division of Penguin and ‘‘prove that what Americans needed was paperback books’’, as she once wrote.

They rented a seventh-floor loft on East 17th

Street, which doubled as their apartment. Once their shipment of 50,000 paperbacks had arrived from London the couple set out to secure orders. They discovered there were only about 1500 dedicated bookstores in the United States, of which barely 500 had good credit ratings.

Undeterred, the Ballantines pursued outlets such as department stores, drugstores and railway stations, persuading them to stock paperback editions of The Invisible Man by HG Wells, My Man Jeeves by PG Wodehouse and Ballet by Arnold Haskell – all selling at 25 cents apiece. As the war progressed, books from Britain became harder to obtain and the couple wanted to publish new works themselves. Their first homegrown American product was What’s That Plane?, an aircraft recognition book that the Ballantines and their friends put together ‘‘around a large dining room table a couple of Sundays after Pearl Harbor’’.

After the war, the couple parted company with Penguin. ‘‘We thought that more of the titles should be American-orientated, with covers designed to appeal to American tastes, while Lane felt the American branch should resume being an importer of English books,’’ Betty Ballantine wrote in 1989. They set up Bantam Books, owned by the Curtis Publishing Company, producing paperback reprints of works by leading novelists such as F Scott Fitzgerald, John Hersey and Ernest Hemingway. They soon branched out into historical novels and westerns.

They finally went independent in 1952 with Ballantine Books, which was initially dedicated to publishing only original works. Her main interest was science fiction and the company was one of the first publishers of Arthur C Clarke, Frederik Pohl and Anne McCaffrey, as well as producing the first authorised paperback edition of JRR Tolkien’s works. It also published Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

She was born Elizabeth Norah Jones in Faizabad, India, the youngest of four children

‘Paperback publishing has been a more-or-less continuous gamble ... But it is a load of fun.’’

of a British colonial officer. He taught her to read when she was 3 and for some time she thought the characters were real. ‘‘Tarzan was a real person to me, as was every character in the Dickens books,’’ she said. On one occasion young Betty saved her father’s life by throwing a pebble in a jungle pond just as he was about to take a dip. It caused an enormous ripple from which emerged a crocodile which, she always insisted, could have eaten her father whole.

After school in India, she completed her education in the Channel Islands. It was in Jersey in 1938 that she met Ian Ballantine. They were married the following year. Ballantine Books was sold in the early 1970s and she ended up back at Penguin, editing works such as Out on a Limb ,by Shirley MacLaine. Editing had never been her intention, but she enjoyed the science fiction. ‘‘My head was always full of questions when I met with a writer,’’ she recalled. ‘‘I never said, ‘Do this, do that.’ That would be presumptuous and you can’t do that with a writer. You say, ‘What are you trying to get at here?’ That way you begin to elicit what it is they’re after . . . Often they don’t know what they want to say, so you become psychologist, as well as mother, banker, lawyer: a whole gamut of relationships.’’

By 1975 the couple had established Peacock Press, producing large-format coffee-table books often dedicated to works of art. Ballantine wrote only one book herself, a novel entitled The Secret Oceans (1994). Ian died in 1995. They had one son, Richard, who died in 2013 aged 72. She is survived by three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

She became a popular figure at sciencefiction conventions and remained an avid reader of books until fading eyesight robbed her of the pleasure, after which her 40 shelves of paperbacks were donated to Columbia University. She would relax in her pool, sipping champagne and listening to classical music.

As for the paperback revolution, Ballantine was delighted to have played her part. ‘‘Paperback publishing has been a moreor-less continuous gamble: exciting, vital, full of crisis, often cut-throat and always rapidly moving,’’ she once said. ‘‘But it is a load of fun.’’ –