A Family Tree of Paperback Book Publishers

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!

The history of certain long-running paperback book publishing houses fascinates me. Recently I read a new romance novel by a popular publisher of mass-market paperbacks, Grand Central Publishing, and I wondered how long they had been around. The imprint of this particular Grand Central book was "Forever," a name that I had seen on older romance novels, too. 

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....

A similar story, with a similar name, was another 1960s paperback publisher called Popular Library, which was co-founded in 1942 by Ned Pines, known to fans of Golden-Age comics as the publisher of Standard Comics. Popular's pinetree-shaped cover icon (shown at left) was fashioned after Pines' own name. In 1971, Popular Library was sold to CBS, who in 1976 bought another publisher with a comics connection, Fawcett. Fawcett was a prominent paperback book publisher with imprints like Fawcett Crest and Fawcett Gold Medal, and in the late 1970s Fawcett Popular Library was added to these, reflecting the acquisition of Popular Library. CBS Publications sold Fawcett to Ballantine Books in 1982 after the U.S. Justice Department ordered CBS to divest itself of Fawcett due to concerns that it would create a monopoly. (Oh, how times have changed!) However, Popular Library was sold separately -- to Warner Communications. Yes, that's right -- the same company mentioned earlier that bought Paperback Library now owned Popular Library as well. In 1985, Warner Books revived Popular Library, but the brand was eliminated in 1991 and remains defunct. Does Hachette own Popular Library now, since its 2006 purchase of Warner Books?

Speaking of Fawcett, its obscure fate seems to me particularly unfortunate since its brand was once so well known. As noted above, Ballantine acquired Fawcett in 1982. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Fawcett had published a regular line of traditional Regency romance novels, but that ended in 1998. According to Wikipedia (which doesn't provide a source): "The imprint stopped being used on new books at the beginning of the 21st century." Presumably Ballantine (which is owned by Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann) still owns Fawcett, but has decided not to use it for some reason. Why buy it and not use it?

A 2002 Publishers Weekly article explains that Ballantine Books had been founded in 1952, acquired by Random House in 1973, and that Random House in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann in 1998. "Gina Centrello became president and publisher in March 1999," the article notes, and "Centrello has also given the different imprints more specific identities. Fawcett focuses on mysteries, and Ivy Books is devoted solely to publishing mass market paperback romance titles." In the 1970s, the Ballantine imprint Beagle Books published romance novels, including a numbered line of books by the Australian writer Lucy Walker.

Another Ballantine imprint is Del Rey Books (founded in 1977 by Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey) which publishes science fiction and fantasy. For decades, Del Rey has published numerous original Star Wars novels, beginning in 1978 with Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster, the first time that any of the Star Wars characters appeared in prose fiction outside of the novelization of the movie itself (which Ballantine had also published -- at the end of 1976, half a year before the movie came out). As a teenager in the 1980s, I recall Del Rey Books for the H. P. Lovecraft paperbacks that I bought at bookstores like B. Dalton.

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."

Dell has long been one of my favorite paperback publishers, especially for their 1960s editions that have a nice compact size. Like Fawcett, Dell had also published comic books and magazines. They began publishing paperback books in 1943, and until 1951 the back covers featured maps that are popular with collectors. Dell's paperbacks prior to the 1980s often had green page edges. To compete with Harlequin, Dell had their own similar Candelight Romance line, beginning in 1967. According to its Wikipedia page, "Dell Publishing no longer exists as an independent entity. Dell was acquired by Doubleday in 1976. Doubleday was acquired by Bertelsmann in 1986, who formed Bantam Doubleday Dell as its US subsidiary. Bertelsmann acquired Random House in 1998 and renamed its US business after the acquisition. After the merger, Bantam was merged with Dell Publishing." Mass-market paperback editions of bestselling authors such as Danielle Steel, John Grisham, and Lee Child are still published today under the Dell imprint, so (unlike Fawcett) the Dell name is not totally dead, but it no longer has a particularly unique identity that distinguishes it from other publishers.

Bantam Books was co-founded in 1945 by Ian and Betty Ballantine who, as you may suspect from their last name, later went on to found Ballantine Books in 1952. Just as Pocket Books are easily identifiable by their kangaroo mascot Gertrude, Bantam had a bantam rooster on their spines. Growing up in the 1980s, I often saw mass-market paperbacks of classic literature under the "A Bantam Classic" banner. In the 1990s Bantam published the romance line Bantam Fanfare and the science fiction line Bantam Spectra. In 1976, Doubleday bought Dell and shortly afterwards Bertelsmann acquired Bantam. In 1986, Bertelsmann bought Doubleday, which became Bantam Doubleday Dell. Random House had already acquired Ballantine Books in 1973, so that meant when Bertelsmann acquired Random House in 1998 they got Ballantine as well. The formerly individual publishers Ballantine, Bantam, Dell, Doubleday, and Random House were now all owned by one huge company, Bertelsmann. In recent years Bertelsmann added Penguin Books to their acquisitions, which is now known as Penguin Random House with (as noted above) plans to add Simon & Schuster to the group as well. Bantam, Dell and Del Rey have since adopted a "house" image as their colophons, to reflect their relationship within Random House. (So, in other words, the rooster croaked.)

If you visit the official website of Penguin Random House and view the page there listing their various imprints, you will find them placed in certain divisions. The "Random House" grouping contains the imprints discussed above -- Ballantine, Bantam, Del Rey, Dell, Random House -- as well as Broadway Books (represented on their books' spines with a stylized "B\D\W\Y"), which is an imprint of Crown; Dial Press, Loveswept (an e-book revival of Bantam's fondly-remembered 1980s-90s category romance line) and many others. The "Penguin Publishing Group" on the same page contains Penguin Books (a prestigious British company founded in 1935) as well as Berkley, DAW (science fiction & fantasy publisher founded by Donald A. Wollheim in 1971), G. P. Putnam's Sons (founded in 1838; these days their paperbacks simply say "Putman" on the spines with the full name of the company inside), Viking (which, like Doubleday, also published Stephen King's early novels) and others. "The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group" listed on the page includes more prestige imprints such as Anchor Books and Vintage Books (who also publish mass-market paperbacks, although fewer than most of the others on this list).

Some of the above imprints have their own convoluted histories. Berkley Books was a mass-market paperback book publishing company founded in 1955 (also sometimes called Berkley Medallion) that was later acquired by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1965. The latter's Wikipedia page states: "MCA bought Putnam Publishing Group and Berkley Publishing Group in 1975." In 1982, Putnam acquired another large publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, as well as Playboy's paperback book division Playboy Press (which had published historical romance novels). In more recent years, the Berkley Prime Crime imprint offered cozy mystery novels, and the Berkley Sensation imprint has published paranormal romance novels by authors such as Nalini Singh.

     Another publisher that wound up in the same company was Ace Books, founded in 1952 and well-remembered for their science fiction double novels (where you would turn the book around to read another novel, with its own cover).  Ace also published a lot of gothic romance novels, many of them with the phrase "First in Gothics" on the cover, as well as numerous nurse novels. Grosset & Dunlap acquired Ace Books in 1972, and in 1976 acquired Charter Communications as well (perhaps best-remembered for the Nick Carter Killmaster series in the 1980s). In more recent years, Roc Books has been associated with Ace as an imprint of Berkley. According to Wikipedia, "When Putnam bought Grosset & Dunlap and Playboy Press, the Ace and Playboy Press paperback lists were added to that of Berkley; the Playboy list was eventually absorbed into Berkley, while the Jove and Ace lists have continued as distinct imprints."

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.

Jove Books is still around today, offering the paperback books of authors like Mary Balogh and Christine Feehan, but you'd pretty much never know it from looking online. Jove is not listed on the page for its imprints at the official Penguin Random House website, for example (although it is included in a lengthy scroll of text here), nor mentioned as an imprint of Berkley on the site's page for Berkley either. On bibliographical sites like Fantastic Fiction, the publisher is usually listed as Berkley, with no mention of Jove. Unlike Grand Central's "Forever" imprint, which has the "Forever" name on the spine, only the Berkley name appears on the spines of current Jove books. But if you look inside the book, the title page will note that it is "A Jove Book," followed by "Published by Berkley," and then "An imprint of Random House LLC." So, Jove has gone from being a publisher itself to barely an imprint, and one that is almost invisible these days when it comes to promotion of its brand.

Ace and Jove are not the only publishers that seem to have a less visible presence since they became imprints of Berkley. New American Library (NAL for short) was a once-prominent publisher founded in 1948, with paperback book imprints such as the popular Signet Books (which had its own imprints like Signet Classics that reprinted great literature and the long-running Signet Regency Romance line) and the educational Mentor Books. Some of NAL's now-defunct imprints of the 1990s include Onyx (which, despite what it says at the link, also published romance) and Topaz (historical romance). Berkley still owns them, but ain't doing much with them, it seems.

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.

As mentioned earlier, Simon & Schuster owns Pocket Books, which was the first U.S. paperback book publisher, founded in 1939. In 1959, the Washington Square Press imprint began, devoted to classic literature; it is still with Simon & Schuster today, as an imprint of their Atria division. In 1967, Pocket Books began distributing Canadian publisher Harlequin's romance novels in the United States. In 1979, Pocket Books lost the rights to distribute Harlequin books and so Simon & Schuster decided to create their own line of category romance novels to compete with them, called Silhouette. Harlequin sued Silhouette over the similarity of their covers, which they argued could confuse customers, so Silhouette made minor changes to the cover design of their main Silhouette Romance line. At the same time, Pocket Books was distributing a monthly line of romance novels from Richard Gallen Books, and acquired the rights to publish Star Trek novels (previously held by Bantam in the 1970s). Beginning in 1983 they distributed science fiction novels published by Baen Books, founded by Jim Baen (formerly an editor at Tor, and before that at Ace). In 1984, Harlequin acquired Silhouette, keeping its brand and category lines alive into the 21st century, until they were gradually phased out or rebranded with the Harlequin name. (But more on Harlequin later.)

Another Pocket Books imprint was Pocket Star which, after decades of publishing print editions in various genres, became a digital-only imprint in 2012. In the 1980s-90s, the Pocket Books imprint Archway published new mass-market paperback novels about Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, in addition to other books aimed at teens. Gulf & Western acquired Simon & Schuster (and Pocket Books) in the mid-1970s. In 1989, Gulf & Western became Paramount Communications (having acquired Paramount Pictures in 1966), and thereafter followed a series of changes involving its parent companies Viacom and CBS too confusing to get into here. As noted previously, Penguin Random House plans to acquire Simon & Schuster soon, adding yet another imprint to its massive roster.

Another of "The Big Five," Hachette, was mentioned at the beginning of this long post, as the owner of Grand Central Publishing (formerly Warner Books). Hachette is a French company whose website reflects its international status with the option to read the site in French, English or Spanish. The U.S.-based Hachette is called Hachette Book Group which in addition to Grand Central includes Little, Brown and Company and science fiction imprint Orbit. This post is limited to the North American market, but it is worth mentioning that among Hachette's U.K. holdings are the U.K. paperback book publishers Coronet and Orion Books.

Macmillan, another of "The Big Five," is also an international publisher, founded in the U.K. in 1843, that owns U.K. publishers like Pan Books. Macmillan opened a U.S. branch in 1869 which became a separate company in 1896. Beginning in the 1960s, the U.S. Macmillan was acquired by a succession of companies, spawning various publishing divisions and eventually becoming part of Simon & Schuster in 1994. The U.S. and U.K. Macmillan were reunited in the 2000s when both were acquired by German company Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Macmillan founded the St. Martin's Press imprint in 1952, which today has its own imprints like Minotaur. You can also find many of their mass-market paperbacks in the St. Martin's Paperbacks imprint. Another currently-active Macmillan imprint is Flatiron Books, founded in 2014.

Another Macmillan imprint is Tor Books, a science fiction publisher founded in 1980 by Tom Doherty, who in 1970 was publisher of Tempo Books (a YA division of Grosset & Dunlap) and in 1975 publisher of Ace Books after it was acquired by Grosset & Dunlap. In 1980 Doherty left Ace to found Tor with the financial backing of Richard Gallen. In 1987, Tor was acquired by St. Martin's Press. In 1992, the Orb Books imprint was added, reprinting older science fiction novels, and the following year the Forge Books imprint (for non-SF titles) was created.

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.

In 1999, HarperCollins acquired two more publishers, William Morrow & Company (whose name appears on their books' spines as a stylized "WM Morrow") and Avon Books, both of which had been owned by Hearst. Avon was founded in 1941 as a competitor to Pocket Books, and published comic books during the Golden Age as well. In 1959, Avon was bought by Hearst. Eventually the romance genre would dominate Avon's releases after the phenomenal success of the paperback original The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, which opened the door to more historical romance novels from Avon authors like Rosemary Rogers and Laurie McBain (who became known as "The Avon Ladies"). Today, as one of HarperCollins imprints, Avon remains one of the most popular publishers of romance novels.

The most popular, however, is Harlequin, which HarperCollins' owner News Corp bought from Canadian company Torstar in 2014. This means that technically Avon Books and Harlequin are part of the same company. In fact, when one goes to the official Harlequin website, one can purchase new Avon releases in addition to those published by Harlequin (although only in ebook versions, unlike the Harlequin ones which can be purchased there in either print or ebook editons). Harlequin Books has a long history that is already familiar to many fans of the romance genre. Suffice to say, it was founded in Winnipeg, Canada as a publisher of a variety of genres (not just romance), including some that were in association with U.K. publisher Pan Books. In 1957, with book #407, Harlequin began reprinting romance novels by UK publisher Mills & Boon. By 1963, Harlequin published reprints of Mills & Boon romance novels to the exclusion of anything else. In 1971, Harlequin purchased Mills & Boon, and the novels would appear on both sides of the Atlantic in various category romance novel lines, under the Harlequin name in the U.S. and Canada, and as Mills & Boon in the U.K. and Australia. Harlequin has been so successful and prominent that the publisher's name has become synonymous in public perception with the romance genre itself.

Harlequin has its own imprints (in addition to their category romance lines) including Worldwide (originally including romance, but now focusing on mystery), Gold Eagle (a "men's adventure" imprint best known for the Mack Bolan Executioner novels; Gold Eagle's closure was announced in 2014) and Mira (founded in 1994, for single-title mainstream fiction). Harlequin's line of Christian "inspirational" romances began as the Steeple Hill brand in 1998, which today appear as the Love Inspired and Love Inspired Suspense lines. In 2006 Harlequin founded Kimani Press in order to publish romance novels by African-American authors featuring African-American characters, following Harlequin's purchase of the pioneering Arabesque line from BET Books (more on that later). Arabesque ended in 2015 and the Kimani Romance line ended in 2018, but the existing Harlequin lines (particularly Harlequin Desire) have since become more welcoming of African-American authors.

Another popular publisher of romance novels, Kensington Books, is one that has remained independent, and therefore not part of "the big five" detailed above.

Kensington has its roots in an earlier publisher, Lancer Books, which was co-founded in 1961 by Walter Zacharius. They also had an adults-only imprint (tame by our standards) called Domino Books. Lancer is fondly remembered today by aging fantasy fans for their 1960s paperbacks collecting Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories (later printed by Ace). Also during that decade, Lancer published a few B&W collections reprinting Marvel superheroes such as Spider-Man and the Hulk, the characters' first book appearances outside of the comics themselves. Lancer pioneered "larger print" books, with an "Easy Eye" symbol on their covers. Unfortunately, I've found that some of these books tend to have the pages detach during the reading of them. (I've had to use Elmer's glue to reattach them.) Lancer went out of business in 1973. Magnum Books was a Lancer imprint, although I've seen later printings (post-Lancer's bankruptcy) of some Magnum novels which suggests to me the involvement of another publisher at some point.

In 1974, Walter Zacharius co-founded another company, Kensington Books, and this one didn't go bankrupt. In fact, it's still going strong, and now run by his son, Steven Zacharius. One of Kensington's first and most prominent imprints is Zebra Books, founded in 1975, which is primarily devoted to contemporary and historical romance. (The Zebra Books name is apparently unconnected to an earlier imprint with that name published by Grove Press.) In the 1980s, Zebra published various genres including romance and horror, both of which were booming in that decade. In April 1992, shortly after the death of Kensington's co-founder Roberta Bender Grossman, it was announced that Harlequin would purchase Zebra. By September, however, it was announced that the proposed deal was off, and that "the company will remain privately owned." In the late 1990s, Zebra was publishing two contemporary category romance lines every month: Bouquet (1999-2001) and Precious Gem (a Walmart exclusive line, 1996-2000). Although Zebra ended its long-running traditional Regency romance line in 2005, novels in that subgenre still appear regularly among Zebra's output.

Kensington's other major imprint is Pinnacle Books. In the 1970s, Pinnacle was originally owned by another publisher, and based in Los Angeles. In fact, Harlequin wanted to acquire Pinnacle in 1979, but the U.S. Justice Department warned them against it (just like they had cracked down on CBS for buying Fawcett). Pinnacle was publishing Don Pendleton's Executioner novels, but Harlequin did acquire that series in 1981 as the big gun for the debut of their Gold Eagle line. By 1982, Pinnacle was based out of 1430 Broadway in New York (near Times Square). In 1988, Kensington acquired Pinnacle (which at that time was an imprint of the Windsor Publishing Corporation) that still published a variety of genres including historical romance, although today focuses on westerns and suspense thrillers. Most prominent among these are the westerns credited to the authorship of William W. Johnstone and J. A. Johnstone (his niece). Multiple Johnstone books are released every month (although some are reissues) despite the fact that William W. Johnstone passed away in 2004.

     In 1994, Kensington launched the Arabesque romance line, written by African-American authors and featuring people of color as the main characters. (This actually wasn't the first attempt to do so in the romance genre, since Odyssey Books had begun with the same focus in 1990.)  In this video, Walter Zacharius discussed the origins of the Arabesque line.  In 1998, BET Books acquired Arabesque, although (as Steve Ammidown notes on his romance history blog) "Kensington continued to publish the books" and "BET provided the promotion."  The books looked the same as before, retaining the Arabesque symbol on the spines, except that the Pinnacle symbol was replaced with the BET Books logo, as can be seen on the right side of the photo at the top of this blog post.  The BET Books line was acquired by Harlequin in 2005, as noted earlier.  Kensington replaced Arabesque with another African-American centered imprint, Dafina Books.  Other Kensington imprints include Kensington Mystery, Citadel Press and John Scognamiglio Books (run by the longtime Kensington editor). 

     One prominent paperback publisher who has since vanished from the industry entirely (and not due to being swallowed up by another company) is Dorchester Publishing which was founded in 1971 and shut down its print operations in 2010.  In the 39 years in-between, Dorchester published hundreds of paperbacks, having acquired Leisure Books as an imprint in the early 1980s.  (Leisure Books was previously published by Nordon Publications, which is no longer active.)  In 1993, editor Alicia Condon (now at Kensington) introduced the monthly Love Spell imprint, which included time-travel and futuristic romance novels.  Time travel romances had their own series in the 1990s with the introduction of the Timeswept brand. Another Dorchester imprint was Centurion Books which also published romance novels (I have two of them, both from 1990).  Leisure Books were regularly featured on the front covers of Romantic Times magazine at this time which suggests a heavy investment by Dorchester in the genre. 

     Some Leisure Books were subsequently reprinted under the BMI (Book Margins, Inc.) name, although the relationship between the two companies is unclear.  It is believed that Leisure was able to use BMI as a "phantom" publisher in order to repackage existing books and make them available to stores at a deep discount as "special sales" which would contractually not count towards royalties earned by the author based on the book's sales. (BMI also published a number of Barbara Cartland reprints in 1999, but they had originally been published in the early 1980s by Bantam, not Dorchester.) Years later, in 2011, there were reports that authors were not being paid by Dorchester, shortly before its demise.  The Hard Case Crime series (see below) had been published by Dorchester, but in 2010 they got out in the nick of time, just before it all went under.

     Generally there is less sentimentality and nostalgia associated with mass-market paperback books than with other media, at least among the publishers themselves, where there are few attempts at evoking past efforts with a retro look.  An exception is the Hard Case Crime series, founded in 2004 but looking like a throwback to the mid-20th century with its lurid painted covers.  This is a knowing nostalgia, however, with an expert's eye towards quality and style.  Hard Case Crime was co-published by Dorchester until 2011 when the U.K. publisher Titan Books replaced them.  In recent years the series has been in the slightly-larger trade paperback format, however, not the traditional mass-market paperback (mmpb).  

     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.  

                                                        

     A more recent example of a paperback book publisher appealing to collector nostalgia for an older brand is BBC Books' revival of Target Books (which had published a beloved line of Doctor Who novelizations in the 1970s and 1980s) with replica editions beginning in 2011, followed with brand-new novels since 2017.  You can see from the examples shown here how closely BBC Books has been trying to replicate the look of the original Target editions with their new volumes, so that they match the format that collectors of the originals already have on their shelves.  Above right is the cover of a new Target novel, published in March 2021, and to its left is a Target edition from the year that they first appeared, 1973. (Both BBC Books and Target are U.K. publishers, of course, and therefore outside the scope of this blog post, but as a Doctor Who fan and a fan of vintage paperbacks, I'm making an exception here.  Incidentally, in the 1980s some of the Target Doctor Who novels were reprinted for American audiences in a short-lived numbered line by Pinnacle Books, but the Target editions were also available as imports.) 

     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.  

     Another now-defunct paperback company was Macfadden Books, published by the Macfadden-Bartell Corporation, which used a squeezed-together "MB" symbol on its covers.  Its paperback line derived from another publisher, Hillman, that Macfadden acquired in 1961.  By the 1970s, the Macfadden line was replaced by the short-lived Manor Books.  The MacFadden Romance line (circa 1978-80) may be unrelated to the earlier company, since that line was put out by Kim Publishing (who were then sued by Harlequin for plagiarizing their books).

      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.  

     In 1958, Archie Comics editor Harry Shorten, along with Louis Silberkleit, founded Tower Publications, which owned paperback book imprints Tower Books and Midwood Books.  In the mid-1960s, Tower had its own comic book line as well.  The Bookscans site notes: "In 1969, Belmont was merged with Tower Publications....but they apparently didn't begin producing the "Belmont Tower" series until 1972."  The combined company had a simple "BT" logo on their covers until the paperback book division closed in 1981.

     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?) 

Fortunately there are still some independent mass-market paperback publishers to be found on the shelves at your neighborhood supermarket or department store. In 1987, the company Sourcebooks was founded, which has since become a prominent player in the book industry. I had not heard of them before until recently when obtaining novels of their romance genre imprint Sourcebooks Casablanca. As a growing company, Sourcebooks followed the traditional pattern shown throughout this post and in 2018 it acquired another company -- mystery publisher Poisoned Pen Press. The following year, it was announced that "Penguin Random House has acquired a 45% stake in Sourcebooks," according to the Publishers Weekly article about the news. "The hands-off approach promised by PRH where Sourcebooks is concerned doesn’t mean the two companies won’t be working together," the article notes, quoting PRH's CEO as saying that they can help "awareness of Sourcebooks' brand on a global level, and ....help to expand it." There was "no plan to take a majority stake in Sourcebooks," the article explained.

Another current independent mass-market paperback book publisher that has achieved a lot of visibility in recent years is Entangled Publishing, based in Colorado, along with its imprint Amara. Entangled was founded in 2011 and primarily publishes romantic fiction. Like the above-mentioned Sourcebooks, Entangled does have connections with a larger company, since it is distributed by Macmillan, who note on their website that "Entangled releases approximately 30-45 titles per month in digital first format and 4 per month in simultaneous print and e formats." According to their own site, Entangled also has "a joint partnership with St. Martin’s Press that enables us to showcase a select number of books in mass-market paperback." Despite this success, Entangled apparently doesn't have a page on Wikipedia yet.

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.