George Thomas Delacorte, Jr.'s, fascination with magazines led him to found Dell Publishing Company in 1921. In a career which spanned more than fifty years, he built Dell into one of the largest and most diversified mass-market publishers in the world.

Success in the publishing business, he told reporter Ken McKenna in a 1 July 1962 New York Herald Tribune interview, is a matter of timing, of knowing what the public wants before the public becomes aware of it. This philosophy led McKenna to call Delacorte "the man who made money guessing what the low-brows wanted."

This philosophy also kept Dell competitive over the years in the face of persistent shifts in popular reading trends. Dell published pulps in the 1920s, launched movie and fan magazines in the 1930s, emerged as one of the largest comic-book publishers in the 1940s, and entrenched itself in the paperback-book industry in the 1950s...