Gregg Press was founded about 1965 by Charles Gregg in
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey
Upper Saddle River is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough's population was 8,208,ITT Corp. in 1972, and the operation was moved to Boston, becoming a division of ITT's library reference publishing company, G. K. Hall & Co. James F. Koehlinger, General Manager of Gregg, moved to Boston with the company to oversee its transition for a year. Thomas T. Beeler was hired as editor of Gregg Press in Boston in June 1972. Beeler developed a Library Reference reprint series for Gregg and oversaw the publication of the already-contracted American Revolutionary Series.
Science fiction
After Koehlinger left, Beeler developed an idea for a science fiction series with a long-time friend and fellow English department graduate student at Columbia, David G. Hartwell. The idea for the series was to produce permanent hardcover editions of the classics of science fiction, including works still in copyright. Each book in the series offered a facsimile of the first edition of the work with a new introduction written by a contemporary science fiction author. Beeler handled contracts, design and production, while Hartwell made the selections and secured authors for the introductions, some of which were ultimately written by Hartwell himself.
Ultimately 252 titles appeared in the Gregg Press Science Fiction Series between 1974 and 1985. All titles were printed on acid-free paper, sewn and bound in library-grade cloth bindings stamped with a color panel and gold lettering. There were no book jackets, giving the series a permanent library look. Most print runs were under 500 copies. A few titles, most notably
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein (; July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scientific accu ...
's '' Destination: Moon'', were reprinted, but no one title ever sold more than 1,250 copies.
In addition to the classic titles Hartwell and Beeler also produced sets of titles in series with jackets. These included the
Witch World
Witch World is a speculative fiction project of American writer Andre Norton, inaugurated by her 1963 novel '' Witch World'' and continuing more than four decades. Beginning in the mid-1980s, when she was about 75 years old, Norton recruited othe ...
novels of
Andre Norton
Andre Alice Norton (born Alice Mary Norton, February 17, 1912 – March 17, 2005) was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy, who also wrote works of historical and contemporary fiction. She wrote primarily under the pen name ...
and the
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are two sword-and-sorcery heroes appearing in stories written by American author Fritz Leiber. They are the protagonists of what are probably Leiber's best-known stories. One of his motives in writing them was to have ...
collection of
Fritz Leiber
Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. ( ; December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright, and chess expert. With writers such as Rober ...
.
Authors were usually represented in series with introductions by authorities in the field such as
Thomas M. Disch
Thomas Michael Disch (February 2, 1940 – July 4, 2008) was an American science fiction author and poet. He won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book – previously called "Best Non-Fiction Book" – in 1999, and he had two other Hugo nomination ...
, Lou Stathis and Paul Williams. Many of the Gregg editions were bibliographically important as the first hardback editions of many books, including several by Leiber and Philip K. Dick.
Dust jacket artists included
Wayne Barlowe
Wayne Douglas Barlowe is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, painter, and concept artist. Barlowe's work focuses on esoteric landscapes and creatures such as citizens of hell and alien worlds. He has painted over 300 book and magazi ...
and
Vincent Di Fate
Vincent Di Fate (born November 21, 1945) is an American artist specializing in science fiction, fantasy and realistic space art (hardware art) illustration. He was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on June 25, 2011.
Di Fate was bor ...
. Some books featured frontispiece illustrations by Hannah Shapiro. Promotional art for Gregg Press was by
Jim McDermott
James Adelbert McDermott (born December 28, 1936) is an American politician and psychiatrist who was the U.S. representative for from 1989 to 2017. He is a member of the Democratic Party. The 7th District includes most of Seattle, Vashon I ...
.
Other lines
Gregg produced a mystery reprint series edited by
Otto Penzler
Otto Penzler (born July 8, 1942) is a German-born American editor of mystery fiction, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City.
Biography
Born in Germany to a German-American mother and a German father, Penzler moved to The ...
, a children's series edited by Betsy Groban and a few groups of popular and bestselling novels that had originally been published only as mass market paperbacks, including Silhouette Romances. The aim of these series was to establish a market for Gregg Books at higher print runs among public libraries.
These secondary series met with limited success, and by the mid-1980s Gregg was no longer publishing. In March, 1985, when ITT sold G.K. Hall & Co. to
Macmillan Publishing
Macmillan Publishers (occasionally known as the Macmillan Group; formally Macmillan Publishers Ltd and Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC) is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be one of the 'Big Five' English language publi ...
in New York, Gregg was no longer active. G.K. Hall is now an imprint of
Thomson Gale
Gale is a global provider of research and digital learning resources. The company is based in Farmington Hills, Michigan, west of Detroit. It has been a division of Cengage since 2007.
The company, formerly known as Gale Research and the Gale G ...