Publishing Program and Present Activity

The Theosophical Publishing House's catalog has always centered on the core texts of the movement's founders, Blavatsky, Olcott and later Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater, alongside works by other prominent Adyar Society figures, but it also became an important channel through which Indian and Buddhist philosophical texts and commentary reached English speaking readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflecting the Society's stated aim of encouraging comparative religious study. The press's association with the Society's more controversial episodes, including the promotion of Jiddu Krishnamurti as a World Teacher in the 1910s and 1920s, meant its catalog also carried some of theosophy's most publicly disputed material, which the press continued to keep in print as historical record even after Krishnamurti himself repudiated the role in 1929.

The Wheaton, Illinois affiliate, formally established as successor to an earlier Theosophical Press following the 1966 Salzburg agreement, developed its own separate catalog serving the American Section, giving readers in the United States a domestically published source for the same core texts. The Adyar house remains active today, continuing to publish and distribute theosophical classics and contemporary scholarship from the Society's headquarters, and its catalog remains one of the most complete surviving records of the movement's first century of teaching.