The Theosophical Society had published its periodical The Theosophist and a handful of books through an informal office and bookshop at its Adyar headquarters from shortly after Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Blavatsky established the estate in 1882, but this early operation lacked a dedicated publishing structure separate from the Society's general administration.
In 1913 the Society formally organized the Theosophical Publishing House at Adyar to take over and expand this work, giving the Adyar Society, by then under Annie Besant's presidency, a proper imprint through which to keep the founders' major works in print and to publish new scholarship on comparative religion, Indian philosophy and theosophical doctrine emerging from within the movement.
The press became the primary vehicle for reissuing Blavatsky's foundational texts, including Isis Unveiled, originally published in New York in 1877, and The Secret Doctrine, first published in London in 1888, both central to theosophical teaching and requiring steady republication as membership grew internationally. As the Society expanded into national sections across Europe, the Americas and Asia in the early twentieth century, several sections established their own affiliated Theosophical Publishing House imprints, coordinated through periodic international agreements among the sections, most notably a 1966 accord reached at the Society's World Congress in Salzburg that formalized the relationship between the Adyar press and its American counterpart, based in Wheaton, Illinois.