Shambhala

About Shambhala

Shambhala Publications is an independent, family-owned American publisher of Buddhist, contemplative and spiritual books, founded in Berkeley, California, in 1969 by Samuel Bercholz and Michael Fagan.

The firm grew out of Shambala Booksellers, a small Berkeley shop the two men ran from the late 1960s. Its first book, in 1969, was the American edition of Chögyam Trungpa's Meditation in Action, produced with the British publisher Vincent Stuart. Trungpa remained central to the early list, and Shambhala issued his Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism in 1973.

The company moved to Boulder, Colorado, in 1976 to be close to the Naropa Institute, then to Boston in the mid 1980s (sources give 1984 or 1986), where it occupied Horticultural Hall. It returned to Boulder in September 2015.

Authors on its list include Pema Chödrön (whose Start Where You Are, 1994, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies), Ken Wilber, Fritjof Capra, Thomas Cleary, Natalie Goldberg and A. H. Almaas. Snow Lion Publications, a Tibetan Buddhist list of more than 200 titles, came into the company in 2012, and Rodmell Press was bought in 2016.

Shambhala is still owned by the Bercholz family, with Nikko Odiseos as president since 2010, and its books are distributed through Penguin Random House. It has no connection with the Shambhala International Buddhist organisation or Lion's Roar magazine.