Ballantine Books

Ballantine Books is a publisher that was given license to produce series of original Star Trek books and episode novelizations. Especially noteworthy in this respect was their very first Star Trek publication, the September 1968 reference book publication, The Making of Star Trek, coincidentally the very first one of its kind.

Ballantine Books published the Star Trek material of artist Franz Joseph in 1973, and a series of Star Trek Logs by author Alan Dean Foster. This was not an exclusive license, as comics, technical publications and adaptations were published concurrently by Gold Key Comics and Bantam Books.

Ballantine's Trek material has been reprinted sporadically since then, even after the official license was passed on to Pocket Books in 1979. Again, a noteworthy exception was The Making of Star Trek, which was regularly reprinted by them for over three decades, initially under their own imprint and later on under the Del Rey imprint, resulting in more than thirty reprint editions. Ballantine Books, founded in 1952 by Ian and Betty Ballantine, has been a prolific publisher of books in virtually every conceivable genre. Ballantine was the first publisher that adopted the policy of publishing new books titles both in the more expensive hardcover as well as in the less expensive mass market paperback editions simultaneously. Hitherto, the practice was that paperbacks were cheaper reprints of previously released hardcovers. Ballantine's first publication was the 1952 novel Executive Suite by Cameron Hawley. The publisher ended its independent existence in 1973 when it was acquired by Random House, they themselves being acquired by Bertelsmann AG in 1998, remaining a separate entity within that company to this day. Science fiction and fantasy were from the start well represented in Ballantine's line-up, and eventually became such a large portion of that line-up, that it was decided to publish them under their own imprint, Del Rey Books, established in 1977.