Ballantine's Classic Library of Science Fiction

The first volume, published in 1974

Ballantine's Classic Library of Science Fiction is a series of speculative fiction collections originally published in the 1970s and 1980s purporting to gather together the career-best short works of a selection of authors then prominent in the field. The series was conceived and published in paperback by Ballantine Books (later Del Rey Books), though most of the early volumes also had initial hardcover editions issued by Doubleday's Science Fiction Book Club preceding the Ballantine/Del Rey paperback editions.[1]