Simon & Schuster started because an aunt wanted a crossword book
In 1924 Richard Simon's aunt, a crossword fan, asked where she could buy a collection of the New York World's puzzles. There was none. Simon, then selling pianos, and Max Schuster, editor of a car trade magazine, pooled 8,000 dollars to publish one, and built one of the Big Five publishers on it.
The founders practised what Simon called planned publishing: instead of waiting for manuscripts, they dreamed up books that fit current fads and hired writers to produce them. In 1939 they backed Robert de Graff in founding Pocket Books, America's first paperback publisher, and in 1942 helped launch Little Golden Books. Chicago Sun owner Marshall Field III bought the firm in 1944; after his death in 1957 it was sold back for 1 million dollars.
Big corporate owners followed. Simon died in 1960, and Schuster retired six years later, selling his half to Leon Shimkin, who merged the company with Pocket Books. Gulf+Western acquired it in 1975, and under chief executive Richard Snyder it spent more than 1 billion dollars on acquisitions between 1983 and 1991, including Prentice Hall for 700 million dollars. By 1990 it was the largest publisher in the United States. A video division flopped after Snyder learned the firm did not own video rights to Jane Fonda's hit workout book, but an audiobook arm launched in 1985 thrived.
Ownership kept shifting. Viacom bought parent Paramount in 1994, sold the education business to Pearson in 1998, and passed the publisher to CBS in a 2005 split. In 2012 the US Justice Department named it among publishers accused of conspiring to fix e-book prices; it and others paid into a settlement fund the following year.
The house is known for bestsellers such as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and publishes Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which inspired the name of its Simon451 science fiction imprint. As of 2017 it was the third-largest US publisher, issuing 2,000 titles a year under 35 imprints, and investment firm KKR has owned it since 2023.
Source: Simon & Schuster
