Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (1960's-70's)

[GRWelsh]

Did anyone collect this series? They were a bit before my time but I have a fondness of them since my favorite Tolkien books are the paperbacks from this series with Tolkien's own cover art, and the inexpensive paperbacks exposed the public to much great fantasy that was out of print or forgotten. I think Lin Carter and Ballantine did us a great service with this series as a follow up to the greatly successful Tolkien books. A lot of the cover art in this series was by Gervasio Gallardo, who I first became familiar with as the author of THE CIRCLE OF LIGHT series by Niel Hancock.

[grodog]

John O'Neill at Black Gate has a series of articles on Ballantine's Adult Fantasy line if you're looking for some overviews and historical commentary about the books: www.blackgate.com/?s=ballantine+%22adult+fantasy%22

I've picked up a number of them over the years but I don't collect them per se---if I have an option to buy one of those pbs vs. another one for the same book, I'll go with the BAF version, generally (unless it's a lot more expensive, or more beat-up).

Allan.

[foster1941]

I was sort of collecting them about 10 years or so ago. I eventually had maybe 2/3 of them, of which I’ve read maybe half (but the others are mostly now in storage and not easily accessible so unlikely to be read anytime soon). IMO the reprinted classics - Dunsany, Cabell, Morris, Macdonald, CAS, etc. - were the good stuff, especially since a lot of it had been out of print for decades and never before released in paperback. Carter’s anthologies (where he always managed to insert one of his own stories), the books by then-contemporary authors (Katherine Kurtz, etc), and the really obscure stuff that by and large hasn’t been reprinted since were less good, but none of them are downright bad and all probably worth reading. Just don’t expect every title to be as good as the best ones.