Llewellyn Worldwide

Llewellyn George, a Welsh born astrologer who had emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century, founded his publishing company in Portland, Oregon in 1901, concentrating initially and almost exclusively on astrology in the form of instructional books and annual almanacs aimed at practicing and aspiring astrologers. George also founded the Portland School of Astrology alongside the press, giving the business a combined publishing and teaching identity from the start, and his 1910 book The A to Z Horoscope Maker and Delineator became one of the standard English language astrological reference works of the early twentieth century.

The Moon Sign Book, first issued in 1905 as an annual almanac keyed to lunar positions for gardening, weather prediction and other folk astrological purposes, became one of the company's best known and most durable publications, continuing publication annually for more than a century. George relocated the growing company from Portland to Los Angeles in 1920 to be closer to a larger astrological readership and community, and he continued to run it as a specialist astrological publisher until his death in 1954, after which the company briefly passed into the hands of a printing firm before being offered for sale.

Carl Llewellyn Weschcke, a young Saint Paul, Minnesota publisher, saw the Llewellyn company listed for sale in Publishers Weekly and purchased it in 1961, relocating its operations to Minnesota and beginning a decades long expansion of its catalog well beyond George's original astrological focus. Under Weschcke the company became one of the principal English language publishers for Wicca and contemporary Paganism, psychic development, tarot, alternative healing and the broader New Age movement that grew rapidly from the 1970s onward, publishing many of the movement's most commercially significant authors and helping popularize practical, how to style occult publishing for a general audience rather than the more academic or fraternal lodge oriented publishing that had dominated the field earlier in the century.

The company retained and continued George's original astrological line, including the Moon Sign Book and a growing annual almanac series, alongside its newer subject areas, giving it a catalog that spanned the full range of popular astrology and neopagan and occult publishing by the century's end. Now based in Woodbury, Minnesota and still under Weschcke family ownership and leadership, Llewellyn Worldwide remains one of the largest specialist publishers in its field, marking more than a century of continuous operation since its 1901 founding in Portland.