Inner Traditions International

Ehud Sperling, born in Israel in 1949 and raised from early childhood in New York City, entered the book trade working at a Greenwich Village bookstore in 1970 before later working for the Olympia Press, an experience that exposed him directly to independent and small press publishing at a formative stage. Sperling founded Inner Traditions in June 1975 in New York City, taking the company's name from a book he had read titled The Inner Traditions of Magic, and set out to build a publishing list around subjects that mainstream publishers of the period rarely covered seriously: alternative and complementary health, world spirituality and comparative religion, indigenous and shamanic traditions, and what Sperling and his editors described using the older philosophical term perennial philosophy, the idea of a common mystical core underlying the world's diverse religious traditions.

The young company positioned itself between the more strictly occult and esoteric catalog of publishers such as Weiser Books and the countercultural health and wellness publishing that was also expanding through the 1970s, giving it a broader and more eclectic list than either. Inner Traditions grew steadily through its first decade under Sperling's direct ownership and editorial direction, establishing relationships with authors working across ethnobotany, alternative medicine, ancient civilizations and esoteric spirituality that would define its catalog for decades to come.

Inner Traditions relocated its operations from New York City to Rochester, Vermont in August 1986, a move that took the company out of the traditional publishing industry hub of Manhattan and into rural New England, where it has remained headquartered ever since while continuing to distribute nationally and internationally.

In 2000 the company absorbed Bear & Company, an independent publisher of Indigenous American spirituality, metaphysical and consciousness related titles that the writer Gerry Clow and the astrologer Barbara Hand Clow had founded in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the early 1980s, combining the two catalogs under the joint imprint Inner Traditions, Bear & Company and broadening Inner Traditions' existing list further into indigenous spirituality and New Age subject matter. The combined company continued to grow through the following decades into one of the largest independent publishers specializing in alternative spirituality, ancient civilizations, indigenous traditions, and complementary health, maintaining a reputation for publishing serious research alongside more popular practitioner focused titles.

Ehud Sperling has continued to own and personally direct the company through its full history, a continuity uncommon among publishers of its size and subject area, and Inner Traditions remains active today from its Rochester, Vermont headquarters, marking half a century of continuous independent publishing since its 1975 founding.