He was involved in publishing the works of many notable authors, including Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, Gabriel García Márquez, John Lennon, Ian McEwan, Bruce Chatwin and Salman Rushdie.
[2] After studying at Leighton Park School, he went to Roscoff, France, where he earned a scholarship to spend the summer in an Israeli kibbutz.
It is mentioned that he had written a letter to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who intervened to arrange a passage for Maschler from Marseille to Haifa.
[2] He returned home and worked as a tour guide, and did national service as a part of the Russian Corps of the Royal Air Force.
[2] Earning a reprimand for some of his promotional interviews, he subsequently went on to join Allen Lane's Penguin Books as an assistant fiction editor.
[5] Having seen the success of the French award, and the related sales uplift, Mascher approached Jock Campbell and Charles Tyrrell from the sugar trading firm Booker–McConnell to set up an equivalent for British books.
[10][11][12] In 1991, he stepped down from his position as the chairman of Jonathan Cape, when the company was sold to Si Newhouse's Random House Publishing.
[13] Maschler was sometimes criticised for his forceful approach to publishing, with a charge that while he was good at identifying commercial best sellers, he had "little interest in books for their own sake".
[15] Pym and her sister Hilary invented a weak-tasting dessert, a combination of lime jelly and milk, and called it "Maschler pudding".