Simon & Schuster

• 1. Introduction

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  Simon & Schuster began with a crossword puzzle and a question no one had thought to answer. In 1924, Richard Simon's aunt, an avid puzzle enthusiast, asked him whether there was a book collecting the crossword puzzles from the New York World. There wasn't. Simon and his future partner Max Schuster looked at that gap and saw a business. They pooled their money and launched a publishing house from scratch. Simon was, at that point, a piano salesman. Schuster edited an automotive trade magazine. Neither had run a book company before. What followed was a century of publishing that would reshape how Americans read, learn, and listen. How did a company born from a crossword obsession become one of the five largest English-language publishers on earth? What forces kept it changing hands, growing, and nearly disappearing? And what does it mean that a company started by two young New Yorkers with a hunch now belongs to a global investment firm that paid $1.62 billion for it in 2023?

• 2. Fads, Plans, and a New Idea

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  The early Simon & Schuster operated on a philosophy the founders called "planned publishing." Rather than waiting for an author to arrive with a manuscript, Simon and Schuster identified trends and then hired writers to fill them. They called it exploiting fads, and they were unapologetic about it. The crossword puzzle book that launched the company was the first example. New York World puzzles were popular, no collection existed, and Simon & Schuster produced one. By the 1930s, the company had grown enough to move to Park Avenue in Manhattan, joining what was known as "Publisher's Row." The move signaled a shift from scrappy newcomers to established players. The company's willingness to chase what readers actually wanted, rather than what literary tradition demanded, set a tone that would define its expansions for decades.

• 3. Pocket Books and Little Golden Books

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  In 1939, Simon & Schuster backed Robert Fair de Graff to establish Pocket Books, which became America's first paperback publisher. The paperback format was not yet standard in the United States, and backing it was a genuine commercial gamble. Three years later, in 1942, Simon & Schuster and Western Publishing launched the Little Golden Books series, working with the Artists and Writers Guild. That series, aimed at children, put affordable illustrated books into households across the country. Together, these two ventures meant Simon & Schuster was not merely selling books to existing readers. It was building new audiences by making books cheaper and more accessible. Marshall Field III, owner of the Chicago Sun, recognized the value of these operations and purchased both Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books in 1944. After his death in 1957, the company was sold back to its principals for $1 million.

• 4. Educational Ambitions and a Departure

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  The baby boom reshaped publishing in the 1950s and 1960s. Millions of children meant millions of students, and publishers including Simon & Schuster pivoted toward educational material. Pocket Books launched Washington Square Press in 1959, producing paperback editions of classics like Lorna Doone, Ivanhoe, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Robinson Crusoe. By 1964 the imprint had published more than 200 titles and expected to release another 400 before year's end. In 1967, Simon & Schuster acquired Monarch Press Publishing, Inc., adding its catalog of college and high school study guides. The company's editorial identity was shifting. Then, in 1968, editor-in-chief Robert Gottlieb, who had been at Simon & Schuster since 1955 and edited bestsellers including Joseph Heller's Catch-22, abruptly left for competitor Knopf. He took influential colleagues Nina Bourne and Tony Schulte with him. The departure was a reminder that publishing runs on relationships, and those relationships can walk out the door.

• 5. Gulf+Western, Snyder, and a Billion in Acquisitions

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  On the 28th of January 1975, Gulf+Western acquired Simon & Schuster in an 8-for-1 stock swap. Richard Snyder became CEO in 1979, and under his leadership the company pursued an aggressive acquisition strategy. After Gulf+Western head Charles Bluhdorn died on the 19th of February 1983, his successor Martin Davis told The New York Times that society's demand for educational material justified a push into more stable, more profitable territory than trade publishing. Snyder delivered. In 1984 Simon & Schuster acquired educational publisher Esquire Corporation, which owned Allyn & Bacon, for $180 million. The following year Prentice Hall was absorbed for more than $700 million. Silver Burdett came in 1986, mapmaker Gousha in 1987, and Charles E. Simon in 1988. Three California educational companies followed between 1988 and 1990. By 1991, Simon & Schuster had spent more than $1 billion on acquisitions since 1983. Then-editor Michael Korda described Allyn & Bacon as the "nucleus of S&S's educational and informational business." The company that began with a puzzle book now controlled one of the largest educational publishing operations in the country. Snyder also pushed Simon & Schuster into audiobooks in 1985, a division Korda would later call a major business for the company by the 1990s.

• 6. Sales, Antitrust, and New Owners

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  In 1990 The New York Times described Simon & Schuster as the largest book publisher in the United States, with sales of $1.3 billion the previous year. The company's ascent continued until a corporate reshuffling upended it. Snyder was suddenly fired after Viacom bought Paramount in 1994. Jonathan Newcomb stepped in as his replacement. Later that same year, Simon & Schuster acquired Macmillan for $552.8 million. What followed was a series of divestitures as the company shed educational operations. In 1998 Viacom sold Simon & Schuster's educational division, including Prentice Hall and Macmillan, to Pearson plc for a deal that merged those properties into Pearson Education. The educational empire Snyder had assembled was gone. In the 2010s a different legal threat emerged. On the 11th of April 2012, the United States Department of Justice filed suit against Simon & Schuster, Apple, and four other major publishers, alleging they had conspired to fix e-book prices and weaken Amazon's market position. A federal judge approved a settlement in December 2013. Simon & Schuster and the other publishers paid into a fund compensating customers who had overpaid. The same decade brought a blocked megadeal. On the 25th of November 2020, ViacomCBS announced it would sell Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House for $2.175 billion. US federal judge Florence Y. Pan blocked the deal on the 31st of October 2022. Bertelsmann appealed, then canceled the appeal on November 21. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts ultimately purchased Simon & Schuster for $1.62 billion, with the sale completed on the 30th of October 2023.

• 7. A Hundred Years of Authors

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  The authors Simon & Schuster has published constitute a roster as varied as the company's corporate history. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe sit alongside Stephen King, Joseph Heller, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Bob Woodward, David McCullough, and Walter Isaacson built careers there. So did Shel Silverstein, R. L. Stine, and Carrie Fisher. The company published presidents and political figures including Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump, alongside former Vice President Mike Pence and adviser Kellyanne Conway, whose book deals in 2021 prompted staff protests. In 2022, a different kind of internal story surfaced when employee Filippo Bernardini was arrested in connection with literary phishing thefts that had run from 2016 to 2021. The company released a statement saying it was "shocked and horrified to learn today of the allegations of fraud and identity theft by an employee." The logo that has appeared on all these books carries its own contested origin story. According to one account it was inspired by an 1850 painting called The Sower by Jean-Francois Millet. According to Michael Korda, the colophon actually reproduces a different painting of the same name by Sir John Everett Millais. In May 2024, under its new KKR ownership, Simon & Schuster moved beyond the English-language world for the first time by acquiring Veen Bosch & Keuning, the largest Dutch book publishing company, along with the audiobook producer Thinium and the e-book subscription platform Bookchoice.