Books for Our Journey
AS SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, co-owner Sara Bercholz quips that when the company got its start, “The interest in spirituality was very much in the air, but there wasn’t a lot of ground.”
Maybe it was the psychedelic drugs giving people a glimpse into other realities, or maybe it was the Vietnam War shaking up the status quo, but whatever the reason, there was a widespread hunger back in 1969 to learn about Buddhism and other Eastern religions. People were looking for answers.
Yet in English there were few books on these topics, they were hard to get ahold of, and the books that did exist were of limited scope. As Shambhala Publications’ cofounder Sam Bercholz puts it, “The books were academic, intellectual. They were based on someone’s reading, not on someone’s practice.”
Contrast that with the wide selection of Buddhist reading material that’s available in English today. Now the writers of Buddhist books are people who have put in long hours on the meditation cushion, and based on their personal experience, they have insight into how to bring the dharma into virtually every facet of our lives.
Shambhala Publications has been a leader in bringing about this sea change in Buddhist publishing. With almost two thousand print titles, more than half of which are explicitly about Buddhism, the company is still finding innovative ways to share the dharma with an ever-wider readership.
Over the years, big publishing houses have made
