Jove

About Jove

Jove is an American paperback imprint of the Berkley Publishing Group at Penguin Random House, which began in 1949 as Pyramid Books and is now best known for mass-market romance and crime fiction.

Pyramid was founded in New York in 1949 by Almat Magazine Publishers, with Alfred R. Plaine and Matthew Huttner named as founders. As a paperback house it reprinted and published science fiction and fantasy by Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Harry Harrison, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison and E. E. Smith, as well as Sax Rohmer and John Jakes's Kent Family Chronicles. It was sold to the Walter Reade Organization in the late 1960s.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought Pyramid in the mid-1970s (most sources give 1974, one gives 1975) and renamed it Jove by 1977. In 1979 HBJ sold the struggling Jove list to the Putnam Berkley Group, and it became an imprint of Berkley. Penguin bought the company in 1996 and kept Jove as an imprint, which now sits within Berkley at Penguin Random House.

Under Berkley the Jove list moved towards popular genre fiction. Authors published under the imprint include Nora Roberts, Catherine Coulter, Jayne Ann Krentz, Dick Francis, Steve Martini and W. E. B. Griffin.