If this was a TV documentary, instead of a blog post, it might begin with a cinematic montage showing paperback book publishers' brand icons as they appear on their books' spines. We don't have that kind of budget here, so we'll begin with a photo I took recently of my bookshelf (click to enlarge) showing a variety of publisher colophons (as they are called). Additional colophons are shown below, as I write about each publisher, with the understanding that they are being presented here under fair use laws related to providing information and criticism about the subject. (No one should think that I'm somehow associated with or published by any of the mentioned publishers. I'd love to be, but I'm not.)
The following post is a brief look at the history of some of the more prominent mass-market paperback book publishers -- the companies that publish the small softcover books (usually no larger than 5" x 7") that you can find today on the shelves of your local drugstore, supermarket or big-box retailer. Such books are normally sold on a returnable basis, pulled from the shelves by the vendor after a limited time; the covers on unsold copies are usually torn off and returned to receive credit from the distributor, with an "S" in a triangle on the back cover indicating its "strippable" status. This post's focus is on U.S. paperback publishers, although there are a few non-U.S. ones mentioned as well. I may occasionally update this post as I discover new information. This post was last updated on March 31, 2021 at 12:35pm.
There will undoubtedly be some errors or omissions here, and if you find any, you can let me (and everyone else) know in the comments section at the bottom. Occasionally I found conflicting information and had to decide which version (usually involving a specific year) was correct, or perhaps I forgot (or never knew) something that another reader may consider important and worth mentioning. By necessity I had to use some information found on Wikipedia, which provided a lot of details about the history of various mergers and acquisitions over the years. So, what you read below will inevitably be a heavily-simplified and imperfect account. At any rate, I hope that you will find the following post useful as a general overview about the topic, and that it may give you a greater appreciation of the long history of some of the publishers releasing paperback books today. Enjoy!
Looking it up online, it turns out that Grand Central used to be Warner Books, which of course I was familiar with and have several of their older paperbacks on my shelves. (The logo below is scanned from one of them.) Warner introduced the "Warner Forever" imprint in 2003, and in 2006 Time Warner sold Warner Books to Hachette Livre. In 2007, Hachette renamed Warner Books as Grand Central Publishing.
This reminded me of my collecting of novels by Kathleen Norris; her 1920s-50s books were reprinted by Paperback Library in the mid-to-late 1960s. The company was founded in 1961 and is perhaps best known for its series of Dark Shadows novels (written by Dan Ross under the pen-name Marilyn Ross).
By 1972, the Kathleen Norris books -- still using the same cover design -- were now said to be published by "Warner Paperback Library" since Warner Communications (then known as Kinney National) purchased Paperback Library in 1970. Eventually the "Paperback Library" name was phased out, but who owns it now? When you type in "Paperback Library" on Wikipedia, it redirects you to "Hachette Book Group," but a footnote there says it wasn't acquired by Hachette, per "personal correspondence" in 2020. Hmmm....
If you go to the Wikipedia page for Random House, you'll find this mind-boggling sentence: "In 1998, Bertelsmann AG bought Random House and merged it with Bantam Doubleday Dell and it soon went global." Yep, "Bantam Doubleday Dell" -- which you and I will remember as individual publishers back in the day. The Wikipedia page goes on to say, "In October 2012, Bertelsmann entered into talks with rival conglomerate Pearson plc, over the possibility of combining their respective publishing companies, Random House and Penguin Group. The merger was completed on July 1, 2013, and the new company is Penguin Random House." Recently Bertelsmann announced its intention to purchase Simon & Schuster (whose paperback imprints include Pocket Books) for $2.2 billion.
So, let's mull over that eye-popping phrase "Bantam Doubleday Dell" again. What the heck happened there?
Doubleday is the oldest of the three, founded in 1897. In 1948, Doubleday started a paperback book imprint called Permabooks, but sold it to Pocket Books in 1954. Growing up I had always assumed that Doubleday was related to paperback publisher Signet since Stephen King's hardcover novels were published by Doubleday and the paperback editions published by Signet, but apparently the two companies were unrelated. According to its Wikipedia page, "In 2009 Doubleday merged with Knopf Publishing Group to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is now part of Penguin Random House. In 2019, the official website presents Doubleday as an imprint, not a publisher."
Okay, so that brings us to Jove Books, which I'd not yet mentioned. It all starts with Pyramid Books, a paperback book publisher founded in 1949. In the 1960s, Pyramid published a lot of gothic romance novels (which is how I knew about them). As Jove's Wikipedia page explains, Pyramid "was acquired in 1974 by Harcourt Brace (which became Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) which renamed it to Jove in 1977 and continued the line as an imprint. In 1979, they sold it to The Putnam Berkley Group, which is now part of the Penguin Group." So, this is why the 1980s Second Chance at Love line, for example, is said to be published by "Berkley/Jove" inside.
Understandably, given all of the above acquisitions, Penguin Random House is considered one of "the big five" book publishers. The other four in the "big five" are Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Macmillan. And all of "the big five" have well-known mass-market paperback book imprints. So, we'll take a look at those below.
The final member of "The Big Five" is HarperCollins, who is perhaps the oldest publisher in this list, being the result of an eventual merger between an American company founded by the Harper brothers in 1817 and a Scottish company founded by William Collins in 1819. Both companies had been purchased by Rupert Murdoch, and were renamed HarperCollins in 1989. Harper & Row (HarperCollins' predecessor) had acquired Christian publisher Zondervan in 1988, and HarperCollins acquired another large Christian publisher, Thomas Nelson, in 2012. The two companies were then combined into HarperCollins Christian Publishing.
Over the decades Harlequin has reprinted their older romance novels, again and again, but since the late 1970s they have updated the covers (and sometimes even the titles) of the reprints to make them look more contemporary. An exception was in 2009 when Harlequin reprinted six of their (non-romance) 1950s hard-boiled crime novels in replica editions as part of "The Harlequin Vintage Collection." This led to criticism from some collectors of vintage crime paperbacks, however, when they learned that Harlequin made minor edits to the original texts in order not to offend modern sensibilities, somewhat defeating the purpose of having replica editions of the hard-to-find original paperbacks.
Through the decades, there have been numerous American paperback book publishers that achieved some limited success before fading away entirely after encountering financial difficulties and finding themselves unable to continue, as we have seen above. Some more examples include Award Books (1964-1977), published by Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation (which from 1968 to 1975 owned the U.K. company that created the above-mentioned Target Books). In the 1960s, Award Books published a line of paperback reprints of Inner Sanctum Mystery books that had originally been published in hardcover by Simon & Schuster.
Some of these defunct paperback houses have connections with the history of comic books. Belmont Books was founded in 1960 by Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit and John L. Goldwater. Back in 1939, they had started a comics company called MLJ (named after the first letters of their first names) that became Archie Comics in 1946. In the 1960s, Belmont published several new novels featuring the pulp hero The Shadow (one of them is shown at right). In the 1970s, old Shadow pulp novels were reprinted by Pyramid and its successor Jove. Incidentally, it was announced last year that James Patterson and Brian Sitts are reviving The Shadow in a new series of novels. The first new Shadow novel will be released by Grand Central in July 2021. 
Martin Goodman, publisher of the company that would become Marvel Comics, published paperback novels under the name Lion Books from 1949 to 1957. Monarch Books of Derby, CT published paperback books from 1958 to 1965 in association with Charlton Publications, the magazine and comic book publisher. You can read more about these and other long-gone publishers in Kenneth R. Johnson's Defunct Paperbacks articles, located at the indispensable Bookscans website. (There's also a page about pre-1980 Scholastic Books there. I admit that I left Scholastic out of this post's list of current paperback book publishers. Do they still publish stuff in the standard mass-market paperback book format?)
Although it's possible that the mania for mergers and acquisitions by multinational corporations has allowed some publishers (say, Dell or Jove) to continue to exist in some form when they might have otherwise perished, it can also be argued that the process has robbed some of these formerly independent publishers of the unique qualities that made them successful to begin with. Some have become mere shells of their former selves, the company in name only, on a gradual slide towards eventual elimination. That's the risk whenever an independent publisher is purchased and swallowed up by a much larger company, that the goliath is simply getting rid of the competition instead of adding its own strength to a smaller associate.
For example, while writing this blog post, I looked over various paperbacks that I have on my bookshelves to see which companies published them, and I found two books that were published by Carroll & Graf in the 1990s, reprinting early work by Rex Stout. According to their Wikipedia page, the company was founded in 1982 by the two men after whom the company was named, both of whom had previously worked for Grove Press. "Carroll & Graf was purchased by the Avalon Publishing Group in 1998," the Wikipedia entry concludes. "Avalon was purchased by the Perseus Books Group in January 2007. Avalon closed down Carroll & Graf immediately." This reminds me of what I said earlier about the fate of Fawcett Books: "Why buy it and not use it?"
More than any specific company, however, the thing that I hope the most to endure is the mass-market paperback book itself: an inexpensive and attractive object that can easily be passed from reader to reader for (as we have seen) the span of several decades. There have been some changes through the decades with the format's size, and personally I dislike the tall, narrow format that Pocket Books have been using in recent years. On the other hand, I adore the larger "mass max" format (smaller than a trade paperback, but wider than a traditional mmpb) that was introduced in 2020 and has slowly become standard for single-title releases, at least at Harlequin and Kensington.
While comic books have retreated from drugstore racks to specialty shops, and new record albums occupy a shrinking retail space as music goes increasingly online, and the cover price of a magazine climbs frightfully high, the mass-market paperback novel holds steady, arriving like clockwork every month with more new releases to be read. Some genres and publishers are less represented on the shelves than they were in the past, but there is more ethnic and gender diversity of voices now than before, too. For those who might complain about the price of inflation or the lack of imagination in today's entertainment, I say take a look at today's paperback books. You just might find something worth your time.
