Founding by Ehud Sperling

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.