Over thirty-five years ago, in the kitchen of a small apartment in Oakland, California, Marc Allen and Shakti Gawain started a publishing firm known as Whatever Publishing to put out into the world a few books and booklets they had written. It was a shoestring operation, started with very little capital. Total sales in 1977 were $800.
Today New World Library owns its own spacious building in Novato, California, has sixteen employees, and generates eight-figure revenues. The company’s name changed in the mid-1980s to better reflect the quality of its developing list. One of its first books, Gawain’s Creative Visualization, became an international bestseller and has sold more than six million copies in English and been translated into more than thirty foreign editions.
In the early 1990s, Shakti Gawain formed Nataraj Publishing, and Marc Allen became sole owner as well as publisher of New World Library. In 1998, Gawain and Allen, still close friends, formed a new working partnership, and Nataraj Publishing became an imprint published by New World Library.