Rider

About Rider

Rider is a London publisher of occult, esoteric and spiritual books, now an imprint of Ebury Publishing within Penguin Random House.

Its roots lie with William Rider & Son, a London family printing and publishing firm; one tarot history dates the business to 1882, when William Rider began as a general printer. The specialist list took shape in 1908, when the firm absorbed the occult publisher Philip Wellby, with Ralph Shirley as editorial director. Rider had already been issuing Shirley's monthly The Occult Review since 1905; the magazine ran, at times under other titles, until 1951.

The house is best known to collectors for the tarot deck designed by Arthur Edward Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, issued in 1909 and still widely called the Rider-Waite deck, together with Waite's guides The Key to the Tarot (1910) and The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). Later the firm traded as Rider & Company. Its twentieth-century list included Paul Brunton, Vera Stanley Alder and Gerald Gardner, whose Witchcraft Today appeared under the Rider name in 1954.

In 1992 Rider issued the UK edition of Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Today the imprint publishes on spirituality, the paranormal and current affairs, with authors such as the Dalai Lama, Jack Kornfield and Desmond Tutu.