Villard, also known as Villard Books, is a publishing imprint of Random House, one of the largest publishing companies in the world, owned by Bertelsmann since 1998 and grouped in Penguin Random House since 2013. It was founded in 1983. Villard began as an independent imprint of Random House and is currently a sub-imprint of Ballantine Books, itself an imprint of Random House. It was named after a Stanford White brownstone mansion on Madison Avenue that was the home of Random House for twenty years.