Samuel Weiser opened a secondhand bookstore in New York City's Book Row district in 1926, building over the following decades a reputation as a reliable source for occult, esoteric and metaphysical titles at a time when few general booksellers stocked such material seriously, and the shop became a gathering point for New York's occult and esoteric reading community. By the 1950s customer demand for specific out of print occult classics regularly outstripped what the used and antiquarian trade could supply, and Samuel's son Donald Weiser, who had joined the family business, began reprinting select titles directly, an improvised solution that became Weiser Books, launched from the back of the bookstore in 1957.
The new press's earliest projects concentrated on reprinting nineteenth and early twentieth century occult classics that had fallen out of print, including works by the French ceremonial magician Eliphas Levi and the British occultist A. E. Waite, giving English language readers renewed access to foundational esoteric texts. Donald Weiser expanded the operation through the following decades into producing exclusive new editions, most notably a 1969 edition of Aleister Crowley's The Book of Thoth, cementing Weiser's reputation as a publisher willing to handle Crowley's and similarly disreputable esoteric material when larger publishing houses would not.