In September of 1970, twenty-year-old Ehud C. Sperling walked into his favorite bookstore in Greenwich Village, “Samuel Weiser’s Inc., Specialist in the Occult, Orientalia, and Metaphysics.” He had become discouraged with his studies of physics and mathematics and later psychology and decided to leave college and pursue his interests in the occult, hermeticism, ancient Egypt, the mysteries of consciousness, and the spiritual traditions of the world. Ehud had gone through the experimentation and radicalism of the 1960s and knew for a certainty that there was more to life than ordinary reality. He was a frequent customer at Weiser’s bookstore, which was, at that time, the largest bookstore in the world specializing in the subjects of his interest. On that day in September, Ehud decided to ask the owner of the bookstore and publishing company, Donald Weiser, for a job. With Donald’s acceptance of Ehud as a staff member, the seeds of Inner Traditions were planted in the soil of book selling and publishing.