Byron Preiss Visual Publications: Our Story
Byron Preiss founded Byron Preiss Visual Publications in New York in 1975. Over the next thirty years the company became one of the most inventive book packagers in American publishing, bringing together leading writers, scientists and illustrators for the major houses.
In 1976 Preiss launched Fiction Illustrated, one of the first regularly published lines of graphic novels, including Jim Steranko’s Chandler. The Dinosaurs (1980) was a main selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club. The illustrated science-and-fiction anthologies that followed, beginning with The Planets (Bantam Spectra, 1985), paired scientists with writers such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Roger Zelazny, and continued with The Universe, The Microverse and The Ultimate Dinosaur.
BPVP created “shared world” series that let new writers work in worlds set up by masters of the field: Isaac Asimov’s Robot City, Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime and Philip José Farmer’s The Dungeon. For young readers it produced the Bank Street Ready-to-Read program with Bank Street College of Education, the My Teacher Is an Alien and Camp Haunted Hills books by Bruce Coville, My Babysitter Is a Vampire and Stinky Stanley by Ann Hodgman, Jane Goodall’s My Life with the Chimpanzees and Animal World books, and a revival of Tom Swift. Its celebrity picture books included Paul Simon’s At the Zoo, Jerry Seinfeld’s Halloween, Billy Crystal’s I Already Know I Love You and Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors. It packaged the American Heritage and Scientific American lines and The Words of Gandhi.
Preiss was also an early electronic publisher. His Byron Preiss Multimedia produced CD-ROMs such as The Ultimate Robot and The Ultimate Frank Lloyd Wright, and in 1995 Viacom took a 20 percent stake in the company.
Byron Preiss died in July 2005. In December 2006 J. Boylston & Company, Publishers acquired the assets of Byron Preiss Visual Publications, and it keeps BPVP’s titles in print today.
Titles packaged for Marvel, DC and Hasbro are licensed properties of those companies and are listed separately.