Pyramid Books
| Parent company | Berkley Books (Penguin Group) |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1949 |
| Founder | Alfred R. Plaine and Matthew Huttner |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | New York City |
| Official website | berkleyjoveauthors |
Jove Books, formerly known as Pyramid Books, is an American paperback and eBook publishing imprint, founded as an independent paperback house in 1949 by Almat Magazine Publishers (Alfred R. Plaine and Matthew Huttner). The company was sold to the Walter Reade Organization in the late 1960s. It was acquired in 1974 by Harcourt Brace (which became Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) which renamed it to Jove in 1977 and continued the line as an imprint. In 1979, they sold it to The Putnam Berkley Group, which is now part of the Penguin Group.
Phil Hirsch was vice president of Pyramid Books from 1955-1975 and had his name as author or editor on many of Pyramid's books, many of them anthologies of jokes, cartoons and humor, or concerned with the military and warfare, including some which combined those interests. While not the most prolific publisher of science fiction and fantasy during its years as Pyramid, it did offer some notable original titles in book form, such as Algis Budrys's novel Who? (1958), Theodore Sturgeon's novel Venus Plus X (1960) and several collections of Sturgeon's short fiction, as well as collections, novels and anthologies by Harlan Ellison and Judith Merril. Pyramid speculative fiction editor (1957–67) Donald R. Bensen edited two notable and popular anthologies drawn from the fantasy-fiction magazine Unknown, The Unknown (1963) and The Unknown 5 (1964), the latter including an introduction by and a previously unpublished story by Isaac Asimov, the story having been slated for publication by the magazine, which folded before it could appear. Pyramid in the 1960s also published several notable anthologies edited by L. Sprague de Camp, which helped create a sense of a tradition of sword & sorcery fantasy, and a series of four anthologies drawn from the magazine Weird Tales, attributed to magazine publisher and editor Leo Margulies, though the latter two apparently "ghost-edited" by Sam Moskowitz (Margulies and Moskowitz would in the 1970s launch a short-lived revival of the magazine). Among the notable paperback reprint editions Pyramid published in the 1950s and '60s were several collections by Robert Heinlein, Hal Clement's novel Mission of Gravity, and de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's The Incompleat Enchanter. Pyramid also published Evan Hunter's science fiction novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1956 as by Hunt Collins), and a paperback reprint of Shirley Jackson's novel The Road through the Wall (1956) in two editions with the variant title The Other Side of the Street (the first in 1958). Notable among the original publications in crime fiction were Death is My Dancing Partner (1959), a late novel by Cornell Woolrich, and such anthologies as The Young Punks (also 1959) attributed to Leo Margulies as editor.
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