<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Ace Books has been a major publisher of paperback SF since its founding, in 1953, by A. A. Wyn. It is best known for the Ace Doubles format, in which two books are bound back-to-back. Ace published many sorts of popular book—the first published book by William S. Burroughs was the memoir Junkie, bound with a book by a narcotics cop—but Ace was most successful with SF.

Donald A. Wollheim was the editor in chief at Ace from 1953 to 1971. Under his direction, Ace brought first or early book publication to such major writers as Philip K. Dick, Andre Norton, John Brunner, Robert Silverberg, and Samuel R. Delany. Perhaps the last major writer to debut in the Ace Doubles format was Dean Koontz, in the late 1960s.

Wollheim made a great contribution to the popularization of fantasy by noticing that some of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and J. R. R. Tolkien were under dubious enough copyright to be safely reprinted. There is some question as to whether Lord of the Rings would ever have been issued in paperback without Wollheim's intervention. Authorized versions of both, paying full royalties, have long since been published, and the Ace versions withdrawn.

In 1964, Terry Carr joined the company, and four years later he launched the Ace Science Fiction Specials line, an attempt to bring quality to the field that included such major works as The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin; Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny; and Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ; as well as short story collections by Philip K. Dick and R. A. Lafferty. Carr and Wollheim quarreled, and Wollheim fired Carr for using the office copier to print up a fanzine (ironically, one for The Fantasy Amateur Press Association, which Wollheim had founded).

The company suffered severe financial reverses, and Wollheim left, to found DAW Books, in 1971. Eventually, Ace was bought up by Grosset & Dunlap, which in turn was bought up by Putnam, all of which was finally assimilated by the Penguin Group, which publishes Ace today.

Carr returned to the company in 1982, to edit a new series of Specials, this one limited to first novels, which included Neuromancer by William Gibson; Software by Rudy Rucker; and In the Drift by Michael Swanwick. Carr remained with Ace until his death in 1987.