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Bantam |
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Click the group of books beginning with number:
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Ian Ballantine, who started Bantam when he left Penguin, created some of the best paperbacks ever published. The books were well bound, their cover art was sharp and vivid, and many Bantam titles endure as popular works today. The western, while pretty much a dead genre now, was immensely popular in the 40's and 50's. Ballantine dedicated 25% of his books to westerns, more than other major publishers of the period. Stopping short of illustrating the books themselves, he experimented for a brief time with pen & ink drawings on the inside covers. I've included these when possible, and labeled them "ic." They adorned many of the first hundred titles. I've also included some dust jackets, extremely collectible today. Some of these were Infantry Journal and Superior Reprint books that Ballantine brought with him when he left Penguin, and then wrapped them in Bantam dust jackets. There were numerous gaps in Bantam edition numbers. For example, there are no books between 262 and 300, none between 557 and 700. Only Bantam NUMBERS determine the order of printing, with prefixes such as "A," "F," and seemingly most of the rest of the alphabet, interspersed to identify various prices for books. The FB-series books were 50¢ biographies. "A-" and "AC" were special series books.
The Bantam database was updated in July, 2010
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