By Caroline Boden
This American publishing company was founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and Max Lincoln Schuster. In began when Richard Simon's aunt, a crossword puzzle enthusiast, asked whether there was a book of New York World crossword puzzles. To fill a void in the industry, Simon and Max decided to launch a company. At the time Simon was a piano salesman and Schuster was editor of an automotive trade magazine. They pooled $8,000 (which is equivalent to $119,000 today) to start a company that published crossword puzzles.
Instead of signing authors with planned manuscripts, they came up with their own ideas and hired writers to carry them out. They called this "planned publishing".
With every successful company comes expansion and in 1939, Simon & Schuster financially backed up Robert Fair de Graff that went on to found Pocket Books, America's first paperback publisher. Three years later, Simon & Schuster and Western Printing launched the Little Golden Books series. In 1944, Marshall Field III, owner of the Chicago Sun, purchased Simon & Schuster but the company was sold back to Simon and Schuster following his death.
Over the next twenty years, Simon & Schuster turned toward educational publishing. In 1959, Pocket Books started Washington Square Press, an imprint focused on paperbacks. Within five years, it had published over 200 titles and was expected to print another 400 by the end of the year.
In 1960, Richard Simon died and six years later, Max Schuster retired. The company was sold to Leon Shimkin who then merged Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster. With changes in upper management and ownership over the next twenty years, Simon & Schuster began to acquire more companies such as Allyn & Bacon, Prentice Hall, Silver Burdett, Gousha, Charles E. Simon, Quercus, Fearon Education and Janus Book Publishers by 1991. Simon & Schuster had spent more than $1 billion in acquisitions.
In the 1980s, Simon & Schuster CEO Richard E. Snyder made a successful bid toward video publishing which can be attributed to their future success in the audio book business. Editors were asked to obtain video rights for every new book. In 1989, Gulf and Western Inc., owner of Simon & Schuster, changed its name to Paramount Communications Inc.
The New York Times in 1990 described Simon & Schuster as the largest book publisher in the United States with sales of $1.3 billion the previous year. Simon & Schuster also acquired Green Tiger Press, a children's publisher, the same year.
In 1994, Paramount was sold to Viacom. Simon & Schuster had a change in upper management again and they acquired Macmillan Inc. Four years later, Viacom sold Simon & Schuster's education operations to Pearson Education.
In 2002, Simon & Schuster acquired its Canadian distributor Distican and in 2013 began publishing in the country.
Viacom split into two companies in 2005: CBS Corporation and the other keeping the Viacom name. Simon & Schuster continued to grow their company by acquiring Strebor Books International and Threshold Editons.
In 2009, Simon & Schuster signed a multi-book and co-publishing deal with Glenn Beck which would oversee their imprints and included adult non-fiction, fiction, children and young adult literature, ebooks and audiobooks.
Simon & Schuster reorganized their imprints under four main groups: Atria Publishing Group, Scribner Publishing Group, Simon & Schuster Publishing Group and Gallery Publishing Group.
In 2014, Simon & Schuster signed a multi-year partnership deal with Amazon.com over ebooks and also launched a new fiction imprint.
They continued to expand their company over the next five years, creating new imprints and offering services and courses to help authors with their manuscript. As of 2016, Simon & Schuster had more than 18,000 ebooks available for sale.
Last year, CBS and Viacom reunited to form ViacomCBS after splitting in 2005. Simon & Schuster became part of the newly formed company.
Bestselling Books published by Simon & Schuster
The Outsider by Stephen King An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway This short novel, already a modern classic, is the superbly told, tragic story of a Cuban fisherman in the Gulf Stream and the giant Marlin he kills and loses — specifically referred to in the citation accompanying the author's Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that the perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite. Through Charlie, Stephen Chbosky has created a deeply affecting coming-of-age story, a powerful novel that will spirit you back to those wild and poignant roller coaster days known as growing up.
The Inferno by Dante Alighieri Inferno is a fourteenth-century epic poem by Dante Alighieri in which the poet and pilgrim Dante embarks on a spiritual journey. At the poem's beginning, Dante is lost in a dark wood both literally and spiritually. He meets the soul of his poetic idol, the Roman poet Virgil, who agrees to guide him through Hell.
Labyrinth by Catherine Coulter On a dark night, Agent Sherlock is driving along circuitous mountain roads in West Virginia when her car is suddenly T-boned at an intersection. As her car spins out of control, a man’s body slams against her windshield and then—blackness. When she finally comes to, Sherlock has no memory of the accident, nor of the moments that led right up to it. But what she does know is that the man she hit is a local CIA analyst…and now he’s missing. Meanwhile, in the small town of Gaffer’s Ridge, Virginia, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith has just rescued a kidnapped woman who claims her captor admitted to the murder of three teenage girls. However, the man she accuses is related to the local sheriff and a member of a very powerful family. Special Agent Hammersmith reaches out to Sherlock for help, and they soon realize that the disappearance of the CIA analyst is actually connected to the string of murders. But how?
To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han Lara Jean Covey writes letters to all of her past loves, the letters are meant for her eyes only. Until one day when all the love letters are sent out to her previous loves. Her life is soon thrown into chaos when her foregoing loves confront her one by one.