About Gateways Books

Gateways Books & Tapes has been publishing since 1971.

Our subjects are Transformational Psychology, Spirituality, Fine Art, Judaica, and Inner Work.

The American Book of the Dead by E.J. Gold, first published in 1974, had its 30th anniversary edition published in 2005 -- a shelf life rarely matched by contemporary publications.

Under the imprint of Consciousness Classics, Gateways publishes books by well-known authors that were dropped by the establishment -- including titles such as The Master Game and Warrior's Way by Robert de Ropp, The Deep Self by Dr. John Lilly, and Shivitti: A Vision by Ka-Tzetnik 135633, the most mystical of Holocaust chronicles.

Other imprints include Gateways Fine Art Series, Retro SF (reprints of science fiction classics), and Artemis Books (wholistic health, women.s studies, and literary collections).

Gateways Books & Tapes began as IDHHB Publishing in 1971. Since 1971, Gateways has published transformational ideas of the highest quality in booklets, pamphlets, private edition books, limited editions, fine art editions, and trade editions. In the early years of IDHHB Publishing, the audience for the publications was pre-qualified. Books were sold as an adjunct to public events and training programs. Readers found out about the product line by word of mouth, through lectures and other public events, or at IDHHB centers which they visited.

After several years of publishing small pamphlets and manuals by Reshad Feild and Reb Zalman Schachter as well as E.J. Gold, the first trade paperback books were published and marketed through bookstores. The success of these efforts was largely due to the sales and marketing campaign carried out by Jerry Berman, Publishing Director during those years. Books such as The Creation Story According to Mr. G. and Secret Talks with Mr. G., styled and packaged to appeal to readers of Gurdjieff, sold out printings of 3 to 5 thousand copies. American Book of the Dead (ABD to us), a powerful sacred text by E.J. Gold, was printed by IDHHB and sold as a limited edition only, until Mike McDonnell took a copy of the book to And/Or Press in San Francisco, which immediately agreed to publish a trade paperback edition. This edition successfully sold out a run of 10 to 12 thousand copies during 1974 and 1975. And/Or went bankrupt at that time (no fault of the ABD, we presume), and rights to the book reverted to IDHHB. This title became the flagship of the publishing house, which printed trade paperback editions from 1977 through 1995, 100 thousand or more copies sold in all editions worldwide! This was indeed a successful, if underground, sacred book, which became a classic of the consciousness awakening movement of the '70s.

IDHHB Publishing produced during the '70s, along with the ABD, another edition of The Creation Story entitled The Gabriel Papers, a second edition of Secret Talks with Mr. G., an edition of Natural Childbirth at Home by Cybele and E.J. Gold, which was sold to Signet Books for a mass market paperback edition, and Tantric Sex, which was sold in the '80s for reprinting by Peak Skill Press, a specialized small press of Southern California.

During the '80s, IDHHB initiated a highly successful private edition publishing program presenting talks of E.J. Gold edited into the Secret Talks Volumes, I through XI. These books were printed in runs of 100 to 200 numbered books and sold by mail order and direct phone offering. The books sold for $50 to $100, and this format provided both a steady income for IDHHB and a tight-knit group of especially devoted students who read these volumes. This marketing approach was further enhanced withe Talk of the Month (TOTM) journals, single talks transcribed from tape, printed, and mailed to a group of interested annual subscribers, approximately 75 to 90 people, including study circles that would share the issues. TOTM was issued from 1983 to 1992 and proved to be a strong support for study circle development.

Out of the Secret Talks Volumes and TOTM talks, E.J. Gold created a series of trade books identified as Transformationall Psychoogy and the .Metaphysics. titles which became, along with American Book of the Dead, the hallmark of this publishing house. IDHHB chose a more marketable name, Gateways Books & Tapes, for the business during the early '80s.s. It also launched a music studio and maintained a line of recorded talks sold continuously from the early '70s, to the present. The transformational psychology titles penetrated widely into bookstores beginning with The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus (HBM to us) in 1985. All of the series are still in print and on sale in 1998. Rights sales during the '80s and '90s included foreign rights sales of The Lazy Man.s Guide to Death and Dying (after an excerpt in OMNI Magazine cause the first U.S. edition to sell out in 6 months), HBM, Seven Bodies of Man, and culminating in the 1995 sale of rights for American Book of the Dead to HarperSanFrancisco. Sales of the Harper edition ABD were disappointing, because no promotion accompanied the book, and the Harper sales division considered it to be a simple reprint, rather than a new edition of a persistent classic. Harper remaindered the book (after selling 5 to 8 thousand copies) after about one and one-half years, and Gateways Books & Tapes reverted the rights in late 1996, returning its paperback (with the hallmark red and gold cover.....) to the marketplace.

In the '90s , the music and video production division of Gateways was split off to be an independent recording label, The Union Label, now Cloister Recordings. Gateways book sales peaked in the late '80s and early '90s, then tapered off after 1993 due to a combination of a recession in the book trade generally, difficulties of the press with marketing and sales, and changing priorities of the parent company, IDHHB, and of key staff members. Book sales began to rise again in 1996-97. The Gateways catalog reached approximately 25 trade titles by 1993, including significant transformational books by Robert de Ropp (died 1987), Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and Dr. Claudio Naranjo, whose Ennea-type Structures became the press.s best-seller from 1991 to 1994, adding a new division of readers, the enneagram enthusiasts, to the Gateways mailing list. Dr. Naranjo followed this first success with Character and Neurosis, probably the enneagram book most respected and most widely used by professional counselors, therapists, and psychology training courses. From the early '80s through the mid-.90.s, the Gateways mailing list grew slowly, from the original one thousand or so mail order customers to about four thousand names in 1997--a list of self-qualified readers and serious seekers of transformational ideas. During this same time, Gateways built up a bookstore and wholesale trade list of 3,500 or more.

The wholesale business of Gateways increased during the .80.s an'90s as more paperback titles were published. Gateways began attending the ABA (American Booksellers Assn.) Conventions in 1984 and presented its image and book titles to the book trade annually up to the present. A newsletter called Inner Journeys was launched as a bookstore publicity project, and this was expanded from 4 pages to a 20 to 32 page journal in 1994 to provide a service to bookstore buyers and deliberately present Gateways in the context of other high-quality consciousness and metaphysical publishers. The ABA project built up to a sales level of several thousand dollars of orders written at the show in 1987 and 1988, but this sales volume tapered off as Gatways Books became distributed to the trade by Book people, New Leaf Distributing, Baker & Taylor, Samuel Weiser, Inc., Inland Book Company (now gone), Moving Books (now gone), and a series of smaller library jobbers. The book marketplace also changed due to the skyrocketing volume of new publishers and new titles, such that bookstores more and more prefer to order in large volume from just a few vendors, the wholesalers and distributors.

In 1998, the greatest innovation and impact on Gateways is the addition of internet pages and internet marketing to the repertoire. Beyond the Gateways news postings, Inner Journeys issues beginning to appear on the Web, email orders coming in from web surfers who scan through the Gateways book listings and Canteen Newsletter writeups--Gateways is participating with IDHHB in sponsoring chat rooms directly linked to publishing projects. There are currently weekly chats, visited by individuals from all over the world, focussing on Practical Work on Self by E.J. Gold, American Book of the Dead, and other transformational subjects. A 1998 series of on-line weekend workshops for interested readers world-wide is promising to bring even more attention to Gateways titles, support the publishing house in its direct mail and correspondence course projects, and even send many new readers to bookstores seeking Gateways transformational books and special ordering them when not in stock at some stores. These 21st Century / new paradigm activities promise to increase tremendously the reach of Gateways Books & Tapes and enable it to fulfill with a new zest and zing its aim of reaching readers who need profound but practical transformational resources / techniques.

SUBJECTS OF GATEWAYS BOOKS PUBLICATIONS:

  • Consciousness
  • Transformational psychology
  • Metaphysics
  • Esoteric Judaism
  • Death & Dying
  • Fine Art
  • Science Fiction
  • Spirituality
  • Prayer
  • Angelology
  • New Science

"The best place ever for books on the practical application of spiritual ideas. Features the books of E. J. Gold, a rare individual who has the ability to make the difficult accessible."

-- B.H. California