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From its founding through to 1971 its editor in chief was Donald A. Wollheim who, in addition to publishing conventional paperbacks, also instigated the Ace Double format, printing two short books together Dos-a-dos (i. e., upside down with respect to one another so that there were two front covers and the two texts met in the middle, perhaps with a page or two of house ads between them). Books by established authors were usually bound together with those by less well-known ones, the theory being that this would help the more obscure authors gain popularity in their own right. The main drawback to the Doubles format was that the two books had to fit a fixed page length (usually totalling between 256 and 320 low-height pages), so that one or both would often be cut to fit. The Ace Doubles format continued until the mid- 1970s . In 1965 Wollheim discovered a Copyright loophole in the American edition of '' The Lord Of The Rings '' by J. R. R. Tolkien . The Houghton Mifflin edition had been bound using pages printed in the United Kingdom for the George Allen & Unwin edition. This placed them outside of US Copyright Law as it stood at the time. Exploiting this loophole, Ace Books published the first ever paperback edition of Tolkien's work, featuring cover art and hand-drawn title pages by Jack Gaughan . After considerable controversy and the release of a competitive, authorized (and more complete) edition by Ballantine Books , Ace agreed to pay royalties to Tolkien and let its still-popular edition go out of print. In 1964 Terry Carr had joined the company and in 1968 he initiated the Ace Science Fiction Special line, publishing critically acclaimed original novels by such authors as Alexei Panshin , R. A. Lafferty , and Ursula Le Guin . During the mid-late 1960s Ace also obtained licenses to publish original novels based upon several popular television series of the day, most notably '' The Man From U.N.C.L.E. '' and '' The Prisoner ''. Carr and Wollheim also co-edited an annual ''Year's Best Science Fiction'' Anthology series. In 1971 they both left Ace and went on to edit separate Year's Best volumes. Wollheim founded DAW Books . Carr returned in 1984 as a freelance editor, launching a new series of Ace Specials devoted entirely to first novels, almost all from newer authors. Major authors published by Ace include:
SERIAL NUMBERS Ace titles have had two main types of serial numbers: letter series, such as "D-31" or "H-77", and numeric, such as "10293" or "15697". The letters were used to indicate a price, as given in the following list, which also shows the date range for which each letter prefix was in use.
The first series of Ace books began in 1952 with D-01, a 's ''Too Hot For Hell'' backed with Samuel W. Taylor 's ''The Grinning Gismo''. That series continued until D-599, which was Patricia Libby 's ''Winged Victory for Nurse Kelly''; but the series also included several G and S serial numbers, depending on the price. The D and S did not indicate "Double" (i.e. Dos-a-dos ) or "Single"; there are D-series titles that are not Dos-a-dos , although none of the Dos-a-dos titles have an S serial number. The letter only indicates the price. After this initial series, the F series was begun, at a new price level, and thereafter there were always several different letter series running simultaneously. The D and S prefixes did not appear again after the first series, but the G series acquired its own prefix starting with G-501. Hence the eight earlier G-series titles can be considered part of a different series to the G-series proper. All series after the first kept independent numbering systems, starting at 1 or 101. In January 1969, Ace switched to a numeric coding system. The code depended on the title of the book; or specifically on the first significant word in the title. For example, Tom Purdom 's ''The Barons of Behavior'' was published by Ace in about 1972 as serial number 04760. The first letter of "Barons" is "B", so the code assigned is fairly early in the numeric range 00000 to 99999. This procedure for assigning numeric codes was in use at Ace at least into the early 1990's, and may still be in use today. For Ace doubles, one of the titles was selected and used to determine what serial number should be used. For example, 11560 is the Ace double ''The Communipaths'' by Suzette Haden Elgin , backed with Louis Trimble 's ''The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy''. The serial number here is derived from ''The Communipaths''; a serial number derived from the Trimble would have been about 58000. ACE TITLES Ace titles are frequently collected, both for their covers, and by collectors of the individual genres. The following articles provide lists of these titles, organized by genre and by format (e.g. Dos-a-dos vs. normal format).
For reasons of length, no combined listing showing, e.g. "All doubles in all genres" is provided. However, the following lists give the individual series titles, for all genres.
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