Fawcett Publications

About Fawcett Publications

Fawcett Publications was an American magazine, comic and paperback publisher founded in 1919 by Wilford H. "Captain Billy" Fawcett in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, and best remembered by book collectors for its Gold Medal line of paperback originals.

The company began with the humour magazine Captain Billy's Whiz Bang and grew into a large magazine house, with titles such as True Confessions and Woman's Day, and from 1939 a comics line that introduced Captain Marvel. In 1950 it launched Gold Medal Books, which published new novels directly in paperback rather than reprinting hardbacks, because a 1945 contract with New American Library barred Fawcett from issuing reprints. The series was numbered from 101, starting with Alan Hynd's We Are the Public Enemies.

Gold Medal became a home for crime and suspense writers including John D. MacDonald, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Williams, Richard S. Prather and Harry Whittington. Richard Matheson's I Am Legend first appeared as a Gold Medal paperback in August 1954. Women's Barracks (1950), printed in a run of 200,000, is credited as the first American paperback original bestseller and the starting point of lesbian pulp fiction; its success drew the attention of a 1952 House of Representatives committee on pornographic materials. Its Crest imprint followed in September 1955.

CBS bought Fawcett for $50 million in 1977. Ballantine Books, part of Random House, took over most of the book list in 1982, and the Fawcett name stopped appearing on new books at the start of the 21st century.