One of my early publishing efforts, the clubzine of the International Scientific Association, which was neither international nor scientific.
So many people were happy when I posted my piece on what it was like to work for a pulp house in the early ’40s that I decided to do the same for every publisher I worked for. That’s a fair-sized list of over a span of four decades — five if you count the fanzine publishing I started with, and I do. This is the list:
| 1930s | Fanzine publishing |
| Early 1940s | Popular Publications |
| 1948–1953 | Popular Science books |
| 1953–1960 | Ballantine Books |
| 1960–1967 | Galaxy |
| 1972 | Ace Books |
| 1973–1980 | Bantam Books |
The list is only approximate, because that’s what some of my jobs were, approximate. I was never on the payroll at Ballantine, but in the course of delivering, let me see, 14 books to them over maybe a dozen years I might as well have been. (And by the way, don’t pay too much attention to the dates. I was actually editing Galaxy for close to ten years before I put my name on the masthead because I thought, or hoped, that Horace would recover from his medical problems and come back. And I wasn’t with Ace for a full year. It was maybe seven months before I just couldn’t stand it any longer.)
Related posts:
- How to Publish a Fanzine
- Popular Publications, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
- My Life as Book Editor for Popular Science
- Future posts to come
Grego says:
I look forward to being happy after reading each of these upcoming entries. Thank you, Fred!
August 11, 2011, 1:42 amTAD says:
Would love 2 hear more, especially about the later jobs: How bad WAS Ace anyway? & you did some pretty gutsy work while at Bantam, bringing out DHALGREN and THE FEMALE MAN…. Is there much more 2 say about GALAXY that didn’t get into THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS? Looking forward 2 it….
August 12, 2011, 5:17 amJohnArmstrong says:
Horace Gold must have been quite a guy – so many people recall him with obvious affection, even though they curse his wholesale rewriting of their copy.
Like Heinlein said, “Editors are the only people who think something tastes better after they pee in it.”
Fred, did you get that note about the novel that includes you in the cast of sf authors/characters circa WWII?
August 12, 2011, 12:39 pm