Betty Ballantine

Betty Ballantine (b. 1919) was a pioneering publisher.

Born in India to a colonial family in 1919, she married Ian Ballantine in 1939. The couple soon moved to New York and began importing mass-market paperbacks from the UK. They founded Bantam Books in 1945. The paperback house specialized in cheap reprints of classics, the first books widely sold in train stations, grocery stores, and other non-bookshop locations.

The Ballantines founded Ballantine Books in 1952, one of the first publishing houses to offer original science fiction in simultaneously released in hardcover and paperback. In 1974, they sold Ballantine Books to Random House and rejoined Bantam.

The couple won two World Fantasy Awards, in 1975 and 1984, and Betty received a special SFWA President’s Award in 2002. In 2005, she received the Roots in Writing Award from the SF-FFWs (Science Fiction and Fantasy Female Writers).