Bantam was on track to lose more than $500,000 that year. But Mr. Dystel was so confident of Bantam’s future that he demanded a percentage of future profits.

By the end of the next year, Bantam was making a profit, and by the time Mr. Dystel retired as chairman in 1980, its sales exceeded $100 million a year. It was the largest publisher of paperbacks, with more than 15 percent of a market served by 14 principal houses and several lesser imprints. Paperbacks had come to account for more than half the dollar volume of sales in the nation’s bookstores.

Mr. Dystel reduced inventory, pushed a program to sell classic books by Dostoyevsky and other authors, expanded publishing for schools and children, multiplied the sales force and built a corporate structure.

And he did what he liked most: He found books with a shot at popularity and sold them vigorously.

An early victory was “Battle Cry,” a 1953 novel by Leon Uris about a group of Marines in the South Pacific during World War II. Bantam and a competitor, Pocket Books, each bid $25,000 for paperback rights, according to Al Silverman in his 2008 book, “The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors.” Mr. Dystel won the deal by promising to send Marines to wholesalers to explain their love of the book.

“It was a battle cry for the country that Bantam was in business,” Mr. Dystel told Mr. Silverman.

Other big sellers followed. “Valley of the Dolls” by Jacqueline Susann, which Mr. Dystel predicted would sell a million copies, had a press run of four million the week after its paperback publication in 1967. Four million more copies were published in less than a year.