Bantam Books

Bantam Books

Parent company	Random House
Founded	1945
Founder	Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, Ian Ballantine and Betty Ballantine
Country of origin	United States
Headquarters location	New York City
Imprints	Spectra Skylark
Official website	bantam-dell.atrandom.com

Bantam Books is an American publishing house owned entirely by Random House, the German media corporation subsidiary of Bertelsmann; it is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. It was formed in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine. It has since been purchased several times by companies including National General, Carl Lindner's American Financial and, most recently, Random House. It began as a mass market publisher, mostly of reprints of hardcover books, with some original paperbacks as well. It expanded into both trade paperback and hardcover books, including original works, often reprinted in house as mass market editions.

Bantam has published the entire original run of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series of children's books, as well as the first original novels based upon the Star Trek franchise, publishing about a dozen such books between 1970 and 1982, when the license was taken over by Pocket Books. Bantam also published a dozen volumes of short story adaptations of scripts from Star Trek: The Original Series. Bantam is the American paperback publisher of The Guinness Book of Records.

Other series include Bantam Classics Series, the Bantam Spectra science fiction imprint, the juvenile Skylark imprint, and editions of Shakespeare.

Authors

Authors originally published exclusively or significantly by Bantam include:

• Tracy Hickman
• Margaret Weis
• Maya Angelou
• Isaac Asimov
• Jean Auel
• Louis L'Amour
• Ray Bradbury
• Alan Campbell
• S. S. Van Dine
• James Dobson

• Stephen R. Donaldson
• Frederick Forsyth
• Lisa Gardner
• David Gemmell
• Elizabeth George
• William Gibson
• John Glenn
• Daniel Goleman
• Graham Greene
• John Grisham
• Laurell K. Hamilton
• Thomas Harris

• Stephen Hawking
• Mo Hayder
• Hermann Hesse
• Tami Hoag
• Robin Hobb
• Kay Hooper
• Iris Johansen
• Shmuel Katz
• Dean Koontz
• Emilie Loring
• Lois Lowry
• Robert Ludlum

• Duncan Lunan
• William March
• George R. R. Martin
• Malachi Martin
• Anne McCaffrey
• Andy McDermott
• Terence McKenna
• Farley Mowat
• Joseph Murphy
• Michael Palmer
• Robert M. Pirsig

• Daniel Quinn
• Tom Robbins
• Jane Roberts
• Alan Rodgers
• Alice Schroeder
• H. Norman Schwarzkopf
• Jerry Seinfeld
• Adam Smith
• John Steinbeck
• Neal Stephenson
• Bruce Sterling
• Rex Stout

• William Tenn
• Elie Wiesel
• Ernest Callenbach

Books originally published by Bantam

• Spock Must Die!, James Blish
• Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
• The Gap Cycle, Stephen R. Donaldson
• The Saddle Club series
• Time Machine series
• Blackmark
• Skinny Legs and All
• Jitterbug Perfume
• Still Life with Woodpecker
• The Further Adventures of The Joker
• Who Is Guru Maharaj Ji?
• Interstellar Pig
• Talking Straight
• A Brief History of Time
• Flags of Our Fathers

See also

• Rafael Palacios, early book jacket artist at Bantam

External links

• Official website
• Bantam Books at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)