Simon & Schuster

Simon & Schuster LLC (/ˈʃuːstər/ SHOO-stər) is an American publishing house owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts since 2023. It was founded in New York City in 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster is considered one of the "Big Five" English-language publishers. As of 2017^[update], Simon & Schuster was the third largest publisher in the United States, publishing 2,000 titles annually under 35 different imprints.

In 1924, Richard Simon's aunt, a crossword puzzle enthusiast, asked whether there was a book of New York World crossword puzzles, which were popular at the time. After discovering that none had been published, Simon and Max Schuster decided to launch a company to exploit the opportunity. At the time, Simon was a piano salesman and Schuster was editor of an automotive trade magazine. They pooled US$8,000, equivalent to $147,000 today and started a company that published crossword puzzles.

The new publishing house used "fad" publishing to publish books that exploited current fads and trends. Simon called this "planned publishing". Instead of signing authors with a planned manuscript, they came up with their own ideas, and then hired writers to carry them out.

In the 1930s, the publisher moved to what has been referred to as "Publisher's Row" on Park Avenue in Manhattan, New York.

In 1939, Simon & Schuster backed Robert Fair de Graff to found Pocket Books, America's first paperback publisher. In 1942, Simon & Schuster and Western Publishing launched the Little Golden Books series in cooperation with the Artists and Writers Guild.

In 1944, Marshall Field III, owner of the Chicago Sun, purchased Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books. The company was sold back to Simon & Schuster following his death in 1957 for $1 million.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many publishers including Simon & Schuster turned toward educational publishing due to the baby boom market. Pocket Books focused on paperbacks for the educational market instead of textbooks and started the Washington Square Press imprint in 1959. By 1964, it had published more than 200 titles and was expected to put out another 400 by the end of that year. Books published under the imprint included classic reprints such as Lorna Doone, Ivanhoe, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Robinson Crusoe. In 1967, Simon & Schuster acquired Monarch Press Publishing, Inc., along with its extensive line of college and high school study guides published.

In 1960, Richard Simon died of a heart attack; six years later, Max Schuster retired and sold his half of Simon & Schuster to Leon Shimkin. Shimkin then merged Simon & Schuster with Pocket Books under the name of Simon & Schuster. In 1968, editor-in-chief Robert Gottlieb, who worked at Simon & Schuster since 1955 and edited several bestsellers including Joseph Heller's Catch-22, left abruptly to work at competitor Knopf, taking other influential S&S employees, Nina Bourne, and Tony Schulte.