Avon Publications started in 1941 by publishing comics and digest magazines, and was one of the first American companies to publish paperback books following the success of Pocket Books, the inventors of the pocket-sized mass market paperback. Avon’s early digest magazines are now highly collectible; Avon Fantasy Reader (1946-52) was edited by Donald A. Wollheim featuring lurid covers and stories by many now famous pulp authors who, at the time, were not well known.
Avon was an influential publisher of romance and horror in the late 1960s and 1970s. The 1972 novel The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss was “the first full-length romance novel to be published first in paperback rather than hardback” according to Wikipedia. The Flame and the Flower is cited by romance scholar Janice Radway as a landmark work responsible for the explosion of historical romance novels in a similar vein; it sold over two million copies and set the stage for Avon’s later romance titles to hit the bestseller lists.
For a period of time from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, Avon had a strong showing in the horror field with solid entries like The Auctioneer by Joan Samson and The Godsend by Bernard Taylor. Avon’s paperback originals launched the careers of some well-known horror and thriller authors including Robert McCammon, Michael McDowell, and William Hallahan. All Avon horror novels I have read that were published during this period range from good to excellent.
Avon now focuses primarily on publishing romance titles. They were acquired by the New York publishing conglomerate HarperCollins in 2010.
These cover scans are from the library of Christopher Fulbright. Please note that Realms of Night has an eBay page with occasional horror auctions. Follow our page and save us as a favorite seller for updates.
Avon Titles Spotted in the Wild
Nell Anne “Charlee” Jacob (June 6, 1952 – July 14, 2019) was laid to rest Saturday, July 27 in Oak Grove Memorial Gardens in Irving, TX among family and friends. Charlee was married to Jim Jacob in January, 1983 at Meadowbrook Baptist Church, where the memorial service was held yesterday morning. In recent years, she suffered from a number of ailments, including fibromyalgia, Parkinson’s, and narcolepsy. She was a Texas native, born in Wichita Falls in 1952, a poet and horror author with over 900 publishing credits, 18 books, and four Bram Stoker awards to her name.
Bernard Taylor is a British author and playwright who landed on the horror scene in 1976 with his debut novel The Godsend, published in the U.S. by St. Martins and then in mass market paperback by Avon in 1977. The novel arrived on the scene emblazoned with inevitable comparisons to Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other, but actually (surprise) doesn’t bear much resemblance to those novels at all. The Godsend made a solid impact and was well received, blazing the trail for several more horror novels Taylor wrote through the mid 1990s. He quickly followed up with Sweetheart, Sweetheart (1977). His third novel The Reaping was published in 1980. Taylor wrote several thrillers and horror novels throughout the 1980s, but like many authors working in the genre at that time, hit a dead end in the mid 1990s. His ninth novel, Evil Intent, appeared in 1994, and represented the end of a respectable run in horror. He wrote romantic fiction in the early 2000s under the pseudonym Jess Foley.
Norman Partridge is an American author of mystery and horror who got his start in the small press magazines of the late 1980s. Partridge had been working in a library and wrote a children’s novel that was rejected several times. He decided in 1987 to polish up a few horror stories he wrote in college and try his luck with those. Partridge cast an eye toward markets late in the 1980s horror season: Twilight Zone Magazine closed its doors before he could submit, and The Horror Show published its last issue before he could crack the market.
Theodore “Eibon” Donald (T.E.D.) Klein is an American editor and author who, despite a short list of publishing credits, made an impressive impact on the horror genre. He was a fan of Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Ramsey Campbell, and H.P. Lovecraft. He attended college at Brown University in Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, where he wrote his honors thesis on the works of Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany. After he graduated in 1969, he briefly taught high school English in Dexter, Maine before returning home to New York City. He had a handful of stories published from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s. One of his earliest stories, “The Events at Poroth Farm” was published in From Beyond the Dark Gateway, an offshoot magazine of Harry O. Morris’s Nyctalops, in 1972. The story gained a larger audience when it was reprinted in DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series II in 1974. Some of his other stories were published in Charles L. Grant’s Shadows series, and Kirby McCauley’s landmark anthology Dark Forces in 1980.
