Weiser Books

Samuel Weiser opened a secondhand bookstore in New York City's Book Row district in 1926, building over the following decades a reputation as a reliable source for occult, esoteric and metaphysical titles at a time when few general booksellers stocked such material seriously, and the shop became a gathering point for New York's occult and esoteric reading community. By the 1950s customer demand for specific out of print occult classics regularly outstripped what the used and antiquarian trade could supply, and Samuel's son Donald Weiser, who had joined the family business, began reprinting select titles directly, an improvised solution that became Weiser Books, launched from the back of the bookstore in 1957.

The new press's earliest projects concentrated on reprinting nineteenth and early twentieth century occult classics that had fallen out of print, including works by the French ceremonial magician Eliphas Levi and the British occultist A. E. Waite, giving English language readers renewed access to foundational esoteric texts. Donald Weiser expanded the operation through the following decades into producing exclusive new editions, most notably a 1969 edition of Aleister Crowley's The Book of Thoth, cementing Weiser's reputation as a publisher willing to handle Crowley's and similarly disreputable esoteric material when larger publishing houses would not.

Weiser Books grew through the later twentieth century into one of the principal English language publishers specializing in the occult, esotericism, Western magical traditions, tarot and related metaphysical subjects, publishing both historical reprints and new work by contemporary practitioners and scholars, and its catalog became a standard reference point for readers seeking material outside mainstream religious or academic publishing. In 2000 the Weiser family sold the publishing company, by then operating separately from the original bookstore, to the publishers Michael Kerber and Jan Johnson, who merged it with their own imprint Red Wheel to form Red Wheel/Weiser, retaining Weiser Books as a distinct imprint within the combined company for its historical and traditionally esoteric titles.

The original Samuel Weiser bookstore itself continued for some years afterward as a separate antiquarian business before eventually closing its retail storefront, while the publishing side of the operation, under its new ownership, continued and expanded the reprint and new title program Donald Weiser had begun in 1957. Red Wheel/Weiser remains active today, publishing across several imprints including Weiser Books for esoteric and occult subjects, continuing more than sixty years of publishing history that began in the back of a New York bookstore.