Simon & Schuster
American publishing company
Simon & Schuster LLC ( 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, Simon & Schuster was the third largest publisher in the United States, publishing 2,000 titles annually under 35 different imprints.
History
Early years
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 $150,000 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".
The public source identifies “Simon & Schuster” as american publishing company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Simon, Schuster and American.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Simon & Schuster”, the useful work is to connect “american publishing company” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1756332. VIAF identifies the subject as 149958803. The Library of Congress control number is n50069568. 6 of 8 selected statements include explicit references; 6 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 1924 and 2017.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Simon & Schuster”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Simon & Schuster primary sources, Simon & Schuster archive and Simon research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Simon & Schuster” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.