The Unicorn’s Head

Anyone reading this remember the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series?
For those who don’t, this was a fantasy line put out by Ballantine—at the time a medium sized publishing house owned by Ian and Betty Ballantine—from 1969 through 1975. Most, though not all, of the books were identified with a unicorn-head sigil in a corner of the front cover.
Prior to the official series, the Ballantines had already published Lord of the Rings, E. R. Eddison’s Worm Ouroboros and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. Then fantasy writer Lin Carter wrote a book for them called Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings, which explained that no, Tolkien did not make up elves, dwarves, magic rings or wizards out of whole cloth and detailed some of his predecessors and sources. The book impressed the Ballantines enough that they hired Carter to put out a fantasy line.
It was a great choice. Carter’s own writing, as someone once put it, was like methadone: If you’d used up all the Robert E. Howard available, Carter didn’t give as strong a kick, but his fantasies would satisfy some of the itch. He was, however, very knowledgeable about the history of fantasy and knew many authors who were worthy of reprinting for a new audience.
As part of that audience, I can’t tell you what a blast this series was. This was back in the pre-Internet days, remember: There were no Web sites for used book dealers or small presses who might handle obscure authors. If I wanted  a publisher’s catalog, I had to clip a form out of the back of some SF magazine, then send it in with $2 or $5 or whatever, and that was pretty expensive for me back then, especially since it was only for the privilege of seeing what they had.
By contrast, having classic fantasy authors put out into affordable paperbacks was nirvana. It was also quite educational: I was in my teens and while I’d read a couple of science fiction histories, fantasy was much less well covered, even though I preferred it. The Unicorn’s Head books enlightened me about the great fantasy authors and made them available at the same time.
Thanks to Carter and the Ballantines, I was introduced to Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, James Branch Cabell (an author I suspect was obscure even to better read fans than me), George McDonald and William Morris. The series also introduced new writers such as Evangeline Walton and Katherine Kurtz, and various one-shot books whose authors didn’t write a lot of fantasy (George Meredith’s Shaving of Shagpat and William Beckford’s Vathek, for instance).
They weren’t all classics, of course. Hannes Bok, to name one, tried to write like the great A. Merritt but he was dreadful (I have two of his). But that doesn’t diminish how awesome I found the series as a whole (and still do).
And what’s more the covers were fantastic, as you can see here. The Gervasio Gallardo images in particular are different from anything I’ve seen since. Even though many of the books are available in other editions now, I’d still be willing to shell out extra for the ones I don’t have, rather than a more recent cover.
I bring this up simply because I’m starting to reread my collection (due to the numbers, and all the other things I read, it will take a couple of years) and wanted to share.