[1] Schuster was instrumental in the creation of Pocket Books, and the mass paperback industry, along with Richard L. Simon, Robert F. DeGraff and Leon Shimkin.
[1][4] Barnet Schuster ran a stationery and cigar store in Washington Heights, and it was there that Max attended DeWitt Clinton High School.
[4] Schuster entered college at age 16,[4] and attended the Pulitzer Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University[5] and received a degree in 1917.
[1][4] During his time at Columbia University, he was a correspondent for the Boston Evening Transcript,[4] the United Press and he also contributed to various magazines.
They took her advice, opened up an office in Manhattan (at 37 West Fifty-Seventh Street[4]) with two desks facing each other, and hired Margaret Farrar to compile The First Cross Word Puzzle Book[7] with a print run of 3,600 copies.
Schuster discovered Durant's work in a series of pamphlets called Little Blue Books published by Haldeman-Julius and sold for ten cents a copy.
Schuster's prose, Korda wrote, "was unmistakable and over the years became the S&S house style, a heady, oracular mash of superlatives, puns, and one-liners that most people at S&S could write by the yard but that only Max actually spoke."
Nobody was better at inventing books that filled a need, or at describing them with the kind of enthusiasm that sold them in quantity, or at breaking down the reasons for buying them into one-line sentences.
[8] Schuster was described by Al Silverman as someone who wore thick glasses, severe clothes and "tended to be uncomfortable in the presence of the other people.