By 1946, when New Yorker Ian Ballantine (1916-1995) turned thirty, he had already headed two paperback book companies, American Penguin and the newly formed Bantam Books. He would continue to be a major presence in the industry for decades to come but his go-it-alone entrepreneurial streak would consistently put him in conflict with the suits that ran publishing.
Ballantine was a 22-year old with an interesting pedigree in 1939 when British paperback publisher Penguin tapped him to handle its distribution in the United States, making him a junior partner in the newly formed American Penguin. A native New Yorker, after graduation from Columbia, he had attended the London School of Economics where he had written his thesis on Modern Age, the unsuccessful pioneer attempt to start a paperback publishing concern in the United States. His mother, Sylvia, was the niece of radical anarchist Emma Goldman and served as her American representative after Goldman was deported during the Red Scare that followed the First World War. Ballantine later would become executor of her estate. Ballantine’s father was a Scottish actor and director associated with the famed Provincetown Playhouse. Eugene O’Neill was a family friend. His uncle, Saxe Commings was Sylvia’s brother who gave up his dental practice in Rochester, changed his name and, thanks to his family connections to O’Neill, secured a position as a literary agent before becoming an editor at Random House where his duties included overseeing Modern Library, the successful hardcover reprint imprint that was turning into a bread-and-butter operation for the publisher.
Penguin began in England in 1935 and instantly challenged the overnight success of Albatross Books, the paperback publisher based in Germany. Train station news vendors and chain stores were its principal outlets. From the start, founder Allen Lane looked to enter the American market but copyright issues stood in the way. Now he was working things out and needed a US representative. It would be a shoestring operation at first with the potential to grow rapidly. But it also carried risk as the first efforts to get paperbacks off the ground in the US had shown. Ballantine’s thesis most likely persuaded Lane that his young protege recognized the pitfalls.
On the eve of his return to New York, Ian Ballantine married the Indian-born daughter of a British military man. With the $500 they had received as a wedding gift from Betty Ballantine’s parents, they rented a small office on East 17th Street in 1939, one month after the launch of Pocket Books, their immediate rival. At first American Penguin was just them and a stock boy. The Ballantines covered the first three months of rent on the office and salaries from their wedding gift until revenue came in. Penguin shipped them 10-20 crates of books monthly from England on consignment. The Ballantines called in friends to help them cart the crates up a flight of stairs to their office. They essentially functioned as order takers, canvassing bookstores, mostly in college towns, to see which titles interested them. .
One month after they had opened their office, the war broke out in Europe. Paper rationing and the Nazi blockade limited the quantity of books that Penguin could ship and wartime currency restrictions complicated financing. The production quality of the books printed in England also deteriorated steadily under wartime conditions to the point where they became unattractive to American buyers. But the war also opened up opportunities in the United States for the ambitious young entrepreneur. He negotiated a contract with Infantry Journal to publish paperbacks on military matters, which opened up a supply of tightly rationed paper. He also got the company involved in publishing fiction and nonfiction for distribution by the military to servicemen, a windfall business that introduced millions to paperbacks. For the most part, these wartime books were by contemporary American writers.
Ballantine’s independent streak brought him into conflict with the home office where Lane was unhappy with Ballantine’s management and direction. For his part, Ballantine believed that Lane had no understanding of the competitive American market. Lane was a strong believer in the importance of brand identity. Ballantine argued that American readers would not buy Penguin books simply because they bore the Penguin logo nor was there a booming demand for the books by the genteel British authors that Lane favored. Lane thought the growing business needed an experienced pro whom he found in Kurt Enoch, one of the founders of Albatross Books, who had fled the Nazis in 1940. Enoch, however, largely agreed with Ballantine that American Penguin needed flashier covers and authors like Erskine Caldwell and James M. Cain. In 1945 the long-simmering feud between Lane and Ballantine erupted when Lane visited America. As a result, Lane bought out his young junior partner. Lane would later have problems with Enoch who thought he had been promised a stake in the company. Enoch would leave the start New American Library in 1947.
Ballantine approached his uncle’s employer, Random House, with a proposal to start a new paperback publishing company. Bennett Cerf of Random House, whose own humor anthologies were bestsellers for Pocket Books, agreed to create a new venture, which they dubbed Bantam Books, a name that had previously been used by a short-lived Los Angeles-based paperback book publisher. Under the agreement, the company would be jointly owned by Grosset & Dunlop, in which Random House had a stake, and magazine distributor Curtis Publishing, with which Ballantine had a pre-existing distribution agreement. Ballantine would be a junior partner and day-to-day manager. Grosset & Dunlop, which had been in business since 1900 and published children’s books like the Bobbsey Twin series as well as low-cost reprints of best sellers, had just been acquired by a consortium consisting of Random House, Harper & Bros., Scribner’s, Book-of-the- Month Club, and Little, Brown & Company. Grosset & Dunlap had asked the publishers to step in to prevent a hostile takeover by department store heir Marshall Field, who owned newspapers, including PM in New York, and had bought Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books in 1944.
When Ballantine left American Penguin, he took most of the editorial staff with him, as well as Penguin’s Infantry Journal contract and its distribution agreement with Curtis Publications. Bantam Books opened for business in August 1945 as the war was ending. The first Bantam titles appeared in December. The publishers in the consortium provided the books with Grosset & Dunlop having editorial control and Curtis handling distribution through its sizable staff of field agents. The company spent $500,000 in the first month on distinctive display racks, dubbed “Mae Wests” since the top shelf was larger than the bottom shelves. The books had brightly colored, tasteful covers. Bantam differentiated itself editorially by focusing more on general fiction than on the mysteries that were coming to dominate its competitors’ lists. But the initial list included several mysteries.
Ballantine’s contentious nature soon put him in conflict with the company’s senior partners. The structure of the company, which required Ballantine to report to several more experienced publishing executives, was sure to chaff. In her autobiography, science fiction writer Judith Meril, wrote of her experiences as a Bantam editor in 1947. Ballantine, she wrote, was an interesting man with an “unconquerable naivete” who kept to himself and knew nothing about books but everything about selling them. He often disagreed with everyone else and often was right. As Ballantine’s career showed, being right did not always help when you clashed with the ego of your business superiors.
His independence eventually got him fired from Bantam for investing his own money into Bantam’s expansion into the British market. There was nothing unethical about the transaction, but he had failed to obtain prior approval from Grosset & Dunlop or Random House management which they saw as grounds for termination. Ballantine went on to found a third paperback publisher, Ballantine Books, in 1952. It would be the first company to publish books in paperbacks simultaneously with the hardcover release and also became known for its line of science fiction titles. When Random House acquired Ballantine Books in 1973, one of the first orders of business was to fire the Ballantines from the company that bore their name. Ballantine and his wife became publishing consultants, achieving a notable success when they brought the Dutch children’s book series on Gnomes to the United States, The books proved enormously popular best sellers in the 1970s.