Product Details

Historical Context

Simon & Schuster was founded in 1924 by Richard L. (Dick) Simon and M. Lincoln (Max) Schuster. Their initial project was a crossword puzzle book, the first ever produced, which was a runaway bestseller. From that, the company has grown to become a multifaceted publishing house that publishes more than 2,100 titles annually. Simon & Schuster and its imprints have won 54 Pulitzer Prizes, and been the recipient of numerous National Book Awards and National Book Critics Circle Awards.

From the beginning, these two entrepreneurs approached the business in a much different manner than their more buttoned down colleagues along Publishers Row. The history of S&S is marked by numerous significant industry "firsts." Dick Simon and Max Schuster were aggressive marketers, often spending five to ten times more for advertising and promotion than their competitors: they were the first publisher to offer booksellers the privilege of returning unsold copies for credit; they were the first to apply mass market production and distribution techniques to books, and in 1939, with Robert Fair de Graff, launched the paperback revolution with the founding of Pocket Books, America's first paperback publisher. In 1945, they published the first "instant book." And in 2000, Simon & Schuster became the first publisher to offer an original work by a major author exclusively in electronic form with the publication of Stephen King's eBook Riding the Bullet, a worldwide publishing and media phenomenon.

In 1944, Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books were sold to department store magnate Marshall Field. Upon Field's death in 1957, the company was repurchased by Simon, Schuster, Leon Shimkin and James M. Jacobson, who among them held it in various combinations of ownership until 1975, when Shimkin sold it to international conglomerate Gulf + Western.

In 1984, the company began a period of intense expansion through acquisition, acquiring more than 60 companies, including Prentice Hall and Silver, Burdett, and culminating with the 1994 acquisition of Macmillan Publishing Company. In 1989 Gulf + Western restructured to become Paramount Communications, and in 1994, shortly after the Macmillan acquisition, Viacom Inc. acquired Paramount. In 1998, the company sold its education, professional, and reference units to Pearson PLC. In 2002, Simon & Schuster was integrated with the Paramount motion picture and television studios as part of the Viacom Entertainment Group.

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