Fawcett

About Fawcett

Fawcett is the American publisher founded by Wilford "Captain Billy" Fawcett in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, in 1919, which grew from magazines into a pioneer of original paperback fiction through its Gold Medal line.

The company began with the humour magazine Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, first issued in October 1919, and became a large magazine and comics house. A contract with New American Library barred it from publishing paperback reprints, so in 1950 it launched Gold Medal Books, which published new novels directly in paperback. Authors were paid royalties on the whole print run, and early titles sold in very large numbers: Bruno Fischer's House of Flesh (1950) passed 1.8 million copies. Gold Medal published John D. MacDonald's first novel, The Brass Cupcake, and later his Travis McGee series from The Deep Blue Good-by (1964), along with crime writers such as Charles Williams, David Goodis, Jim Thompson and Richard S. Prather, and Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm novels.

Once the NAL contract ended in 1952, Fawcett added reprint lines. Crest Books and the non-fiction Premier Books both started in September 1955; Crest was known for its Peanuts collections.

CBS Publications bought Fawcett in 1977 for $50 million, and in 1982 most of Fawcett Books passed to Ballantine Books, part of Random House, which continued the Fawcett name for mass-market titles by authors including P. D. James and Anne Perry.