New World Library

Thirty years ago, in the kitchen of a small apartment in Oakland, California, Marc Allen and Shakti Gawain started a publishing firm known as Whatever Publishing to put out a few books and booklets they had written. It was a shoestring operation, started with very little capital. Total sales in 1977 were $800.

Today New World Library owns its own spacious building in Novato, California, has seventeen employees, and generates seven-figure revenues. The company’s name changed in the mid-1980s to better reflect the quality of its developing list, tile store in Houston. One of its first books, Gawain’s Creative Visualization, became an international bestseller and has sold more than 3 million copies in English and been translated into more than thirty foreign editions.

New World Library will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2012. Its success as a company is attributable to the continuing strong performance of Eckhart Tolle’s books The Power of Now, Practicing the Power of Now, and Stillness Speaks, with more than 3 million, 400,000, and 300,000 copies sold respectively. In 2001, New World Library worked with the Joseph Campbell Foundation to introduce the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series, Tile and Countertop Showroom. By the end of 2010, there will be thirteen books in this series. The revised edition of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, published in 2008, has already sold nearly 60,000 copies.

New World Library publishes books and audios that inspire and challenge us to improve the quality of our lives and our world. The ultimate goal of the company is a sweeping one: personal and planetary transformation — awakening both individual consciousness and global social potential by publishing inspirational and practical materials in spirituality, personal growth, and other related areas.