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Ace Books is the oldest continuing publisher of science fiction & fantasy novels, founded in 1953 by magazine publisher A. A. Wyn. It is now a part of Berkley Books a paperback imprint of Penguin Group (USA).
From its founding through to 1971 its editor in chief was Donald A. Wollheim who, in addition to publishing conventional paperbacks, also instigated the "Ace Double" format, printing two books together dos-a-dos (i. e., upside down with respect to one another so that there were two front covers and the two texts met in the middle, perhaps with a page or two of ads between them). Books by established authors were usually bound together with those by less well-known ones, the theory being that this would help the more obscure authors gain popularity in their own right. The main drawback to the Doubles format was that the two books had to fit a fixed page length (usually totalling between 288 and 320 low-height pages), so that one or both would often be cut to fit. The Ace Doubles format continued until the mid-1970s.
In 1965 Wollheim discovered what appeared to be a copyright loophole in the American edition of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. The Houghton Mifflin edition had been bound using pages printed in the United Kingdom for the George Allen & Unwin edition. Wollheim believed that this placed them outside of US copyright law as it stood at the time. Exploiting this loophole, Ace Books published the first ever paperback edition of Tolkien's work, featuring cover art and hand-drawn title pages by Jack Gaughan. The legal row that erupted resulted in Ace being forced to pay compensation to Tolkien and paperback rights being assigned to Ballantine Books. It also gave Ace Books an enormous amount of free publicity, which Wollheim may have been counting on all along.
In 1964 Terry Carr had joined the company and initiated the Ace Science Fiction Specials line, publishing critically-acclaimed works by such authors as Alexei Panshin and Ursula Le Guin.
Carr and Wollheim also co-edited an annual Year's Best Science Fiction anthology series.
In 1971 they both left Ace and went on to edit separate Year's Best volumes. Wollheim founded DAW Books. Carr returned in 1984 as a freelance editor, launching a new series of Ace Specials devoted entirely to new authors.
A few of its major authors have included:
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