Reinvented paperback industry with husband
NEW YORK — Betty Ballantine, the younger half of a groundbreaking husbandand-wife publishing team which helped invent the modern paperback and vastly expand the market for science fiction and other genres through such blockbusters as “The Hobbit” and “Fahrenheit 451,” has died.
Mrs. Ballantine died Tuesday at her home in Bearsville, New York, granddaughter Katharyn Ballantine told The Associated Press. She was 99 and had been in declining health.
Mrs. Ballantine was just 20 and attending school in England, in 1939, when she met and married 23-year-old Ian Ballantine, an American at the London School of Economics. Using a $500 wedding gift from Betty’s father, the Ballantines started out as importers of Penguin paperbacks from England and founded two enduring imprints: Bantam Books and Ballantine Books.
Paperbacks had existed in the U.S. since colonial times but in the 1930s were limited mostly to poorly made “pulp” novels. The Ballantines took advantage of new technology in production and distribution and of a clause in copyright law discovered by Ian that waived fees on books from Britain, where quality paperbacks were much easier to find. Ian Ballantine vowed to “change the reading habits of America.”
Charging as little as a quarter, they published everything from reprints of Mark Twain novels to paperbacks of contemporary best-sellers. They helped established the paperback market for science fiction, Westerns and other genres, releasing original works and reprints by J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke and H.P. Lovecraft, among others. They made their books available in drugstores, railroad stations and other nontraditional outlets.
Their most lucrative publications came in the 1950s and ’60s, when they were running Ballantine Books. Ballantine editor Stanley Kauffmann acquired “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic that came out in 1953.
Years later, a switchboard operator at Ballantine had been reading a hardcover edition of Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and recommended it to the Ballantines. They offered Tolkien’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, $2,500 each for paperback rights to “The Hobbit” and the three “Lord of the Rings” novels. Houghton Mifflin initially declined but reconsidered when pirated editions of the books began appearing. Rights were granted to Ballantine, which included a warning on the books’ covers that Tolkien would not receive royalties from purchases of unauthorized copies.
“The whole science fiction fraternity got behind the book; this was their meat and drink,” Betty Ballantine recalled, according to Al Silverman’s “The Time of Their Lives,” a publishing history which came out in 2008.
The Ballantines sold their company in the late 1960s, and Ballantine and Bantam are now part of Penguin Random House, where both Ballantines ending up working.
Betty Ballantine, the daughter of a British colonial officer, was born Elizabeth Jones in India in 1919.