- Where a printing line appears on the copyright page, the lowest number shows the printing, whatever order the numbers run in; a line with a 1 normally indicates a first printing.
- Book club editions are a common trap: their jackets usually carry no price on the front flap, so a priced jacket is one of the first things to check.
Publisher · founded 1945 · New York City
Bantam Books
Bantam Books is an American publisher founded in 1945 as a paperback reprint house and now an imprint of Random House within Penguin Random House.
- Editions tracked
- 945
- First editions
- 477
- Books
- 841
- Years
- 1949 to 2022
About Bantam Books
Bantam Books is an American publisher founded in 1945 as a mass-market paperback reprint house, and now an imprint of Random House within Penguin Random House.
Its founders were Walter B. Pitkin Jr., Sidney B. Kramer and Ian and Betty Ballantine. Grosset & Dunlap and Curtis Publishing put up the money, and Bantam began by reissuing hardback titles as paperbacks. Oscar Dystel, hired in 1954, returned it to profit within a year, and by 1980 it led the American paperback market with more than 15 per cent of sales. In 1963 it gave its name to Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, in which the US Supreme Court ruled against a Rhode Island commission that had blacklisted publications.
Ownership passed through Grosset & Dunlap, National General, American Financial and the Italian group IFI before Bertelsmann took full control in 1980. Bertelsmann merged Bantam with Dell in 1999, and Ballantine joined in 2010. Books on its list have included the original Choose Your Own Adventure series, early original Star Trek novels, the Bantam Classics series (from 1958), Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and the first edition of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, issued in hardback in June 1992. It won the Locus Award for best publisher in 1998.
Holding a copy? The first edition checker shows Bantam Books's practice for the year on your title page.
Identification
How to identify Bantam Books first editions
Authors
Books
Published by Bantam Books
Frequently asked questions
How do I identify a Bantam Books first edition?
- Where a printing line appears on the copyright page, the lowest number shows the printing, whatever order the numbers run in; a line with a 1 normally indicates a first printing. - Book club editions are a common trap: their jackets usually carry no price on the front flap, so a priced jacket is one of the first things to check.
How many Bantam Books books does MyVolumes track?
We track 945 editions published by Bantam Books, 477 of them first editions, across 841 books.
Where these facts come from
- Bantam Books, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- Snow Crash, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- First-Edition - Identification by Publisher (Allen and Patricia Ahearn), ILAB, 2010 (ilab.org)
- Identifying First Editions, Pt. 1, Independent Online Booksellers Association (ioba.org)
- Identifying first editions (updated 2024), Bev Vincent, StephenKing.com, 2024 (StephenKing.com)
Every fact on this page was checked against the sources listed. Checked 17 October 2026. Reviewed by Harriet Ellis; read how we check facts.