Belmont Tower Sword & Sorcery 1968 to 1981

The history of Belmont and Tower Books (and later Belmont Tower Books) is convoluted. Belmont Books was created by the same company that owned Archie Comics. The firm had published Pulps like Science Fiction, Future Fiction, Science Fiction Quarterly, and Dynamic Science Fiction back in the 1950s. With the Pulps dead, the company planned to publish Westerns, SF, Horror and Romance in paperback form in 1962. (Rumor has it the Belmont name came from the horse racing track.) Their SF anthologies would reprint materials from their dead Pulp titles.

Tower Books started in 1958 has a publisher of men’s erotica. The two companies combined in 1972.

As with the later/contemporary Zebra titles, a majority of these books appeared with covers by Jeff Jones.

Belmont Sword & Sorcery and other forms of Science Fantasy

1968

A hidden gem of S&S by Dave Van Arnam goes undetected as the first foray into S&S.

Things got started when Lin Carter came onboard as an author. Tower at the Edge of Time appeared in 1968 as the Lancer Conan craze started to heat up. Whom the Gods Would Slay by Ivar Jorgensen was another that year, a strange blend of SF and Fantasy with Vikings versus aliens. This novel was written by Paul W. Fairman for Fantastic Adventures in June 1951.

1969

Gardner F. Fox, having split from DC Comics, began his Kothar series with Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman and Kothar of the Magic Sword. Lin Carter did a collection Beyond the Gates of Dream, which had some S&S such as the Conan posthumous collaboration “The Hand of Nergal” along with Horror. Carter also had Giant of World’s End, a series of six that would appear at DAW later. Richard Meade did his only novel for Belmont, Quest of the Dark Queen as Quinn Reade. He had a two book fantasy series for Signet around the same time under his own name.

1970

Dave Van Arnam did the novel Wizard of Storms along with two more Kothars from Fox: Kothar and the Conjurer’s Curse and Kothar and the Wizard Slayer. Kothar and the Conjurer’s Curse and Kothar would be adapted by Roy Thomas as a Conan story in Conan the Barbarian #46-51 (January-June 1975).

1971

Lin Carter’s Quest of Kadji was the first in Kylix series. The later volumes would appear with other publishers.

Belmont Tower Sword & Sorcery

1972

Tower at the Edge of Time, Beyond the Gates of Dream and Quest of Kadji were reprinted with new covers.

1976

Quest of the Dark Queen by Quinn Reade was reprinted (with the third iteration of a Jeff Jones cover). Sword of the Barbarians by Kenneth Bulmer was the first new novel. Part of an S&S series, the novel is closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs than Robert E. Howard. The later stories would appear in Fantasy Tales.

1977

Tower at the Edge of Time reprinted again with a new cover.

1978

Spearmen of Arn by Del DowDell was anpother single novel. DowDell had previously published Warlord of Ghandor at DAW in 1977, then stopped writing.

1979

Wereblood and Werenight by Harry Turtledove (as Eric Iverson) appeared. Turtledove later expanded the Gerin the Fox series under his own name.

Tower Books Sword & Sorcery

Tower Books reissued the Brak Avon Brak books by John Jakes. These included: Brak the Barbarian, Brak vs. The Sorceress Brak vs. The Mark of the Demons, Brak: When Idols Walked all in 1981. After this, Tower stopped publishing though it was decades later before the company technically ended.

The Belmont/Tower Sword & Sorcery had a small corner in the realm of heroic fantasy publishing. The editors had solid writers in Carter, Fox and Bulmer, and offered some minor novels by Reade, Van Arnam and DowDell, as well as launching the career of Harry Turtledove. There is a good chance that all of these books could have been picked up by the neophyte DAW Books, a company that published many similar titles. Fox’s second S&S series about Kyrik appeared at Leisure Books.

By 1981, Sword & Sorcery usually showed up in three places, ACE Books (that had the Conan franchise after Lancer, along with Bantam Books, or Donald A Wollheim’s SF/Fantasy paperback company DAW Books. The also-rans like Belmont Tower, Zebra Books and others had ridden the wave but now abandoned S&S for other waves (Horror in particular).