Ace Books

About Ace Books

Ace Books is an American paperback publisher founded in New York in 1952 by A. A. Wyn, best known for its back-to-back "Ace Double" volumes and for early books by many leading science fiction writers; it is now a Berkley imprint within Penguin Random House.

Ace started with mysteries and westerns and published its first science fiction in 1953; by 1961 science fiction titles outnumbered the other two genres combined. Its first book, D-01, paired Keith Vining's Too Hot for Hell with Samuel W. Taylor's The Grinning Gismo for 35 cents. In 1953 Ace issued William S. Burroughs's Junkie under the name William Lee, bound with a reprint of Maurice Helbrant's Narcotics Agent. Early work by Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin and Roger Zelazny appeared under Ace: Le Guin's Rocannon's World (1966) was half of an Ace Double, and Delany's Babel-17 (May 1966) shared the Nebula Award for Best Novel. In 1965 Ace published an unauthorised American paperback of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, later paying royalties and letting it go out of print. Terry Carr's Ace Science Fiction Specials began in 1967, and a 1984 revival launched William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Wyn died in 1967. Ownership then passed through Charter Communications and Grosset & Dunlap, which G. P. Putnam's Sons bought in 1982, then to Penguin with the Putnam Berkley Group in 1996, and into Penguin Random House in 2013.