Over the last decade, the Internet and other advanced technologies have had far reaching effects on the book industry: Amazon.com offers consumers more than five million book titles from which to choose. Thousands of Independent bookstores have closed their doors, leaving only the chains to compete. To be successful in this environment, commercial publishers have been forced to play a numbers game: the more titles they publish, the better chance that one of theirs will become the next big hit. Watching the numbers as carefully as gamblers studying a horse race, publishers put their money behind the candidate who is first out of the gate leaving others to fall by the wayside. While the upside to all this is that opportunities for a writer to get published (or to self publish) are greater today than ever before, the downside is that many great books written by truly significant thinkers are being lost in this fast-paced shuffle.

Synergetic Press opened its first offices in London in 1979, moving to the American Southwest ten years later.  After almost 30 years of fiercely independent publishing on two continents, we still believe that our job as publishers is to advance the most relevant and far-reaching work we can find. Thus we bring you titles such as the forthcoming PSYCHEDELIC EXPLORATIONS: CONVERSATIONS ON LEARY, THE HARVARD EXPERIMENTS, MILLBROOK AND THE SIXTIES by Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner and John Allen’s ME & THE BIOSPHERES: A MEMOIR BY THE INVENTOR OF BIOSPHERE 2. These are people whose thinking has impacted the world as we know it today; their experiments are vitally important to comprehensively understand our history over the last 50 years.

In short, we publish works that are timeless, and we keep them in print.  Since our inception one of our primary concerns has been the relationship between people and the environment. Hence our backlist includes books such as VINE OF THE SOUL: MEDICINE MEN, THEIR PLANTS AND RITUALS IN THE COLOMBIAN AMAZONIA by Richard Evans Schultes and Robert F. Raffauf;  WHERE THE GODS REIGN: PLANTS AND PEOPLES OF THE COLOMBIAN AMAZON, also by Schultes; and WHITE GOLD; THE DIARY OF A RUBBER CUTTER IN THE AMAZON 1906 – 1916 by John C. Yungjohann. As everyone knows, the Amazon rainforest today is only a shadow of its former self. Without titles like these, written by people who not only visited the Amazon but made it their home for some part of their lives, we would have very little record of what the Amazon once was, how it came to change and what these changes mean as we consider current environmental issues.

For many publishers, the author is incidental to the work itself, but when we reflect upon the books we have published, we can’t help but notice, (and neither can our readers) that every single one of our authors either is already (or becomes soon thereafter) counted among the great thinkers of our times. 

We published Ira Cohen’s first book of poetry way back when. He has since gone on to earn a well-deserved reputation as one of the greatest visionary poets of the last half century.

Nor can our friends and patrons help but notice that there are often ties between our titles. For instance, Richard Evans Schultes, the author of VINE OF THE SOUL, was a mentor at Harvard to Timothy Leary, Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner.  In fact, his stories of indigenous peoples’ rituals in the rainforest inspired some of the experiments recounted in PSYCHEDELIC EXPLORATIONS. And Ira Cohen happened to be on the same ship that would begin Johnny Dolphin’s exploration of the entire planet.  The creation of Biosphere 2 by John Allen (also known as poet Johnny Dolphin) could be said to be a continuation of the pioneering work of seminal Russo-Ukrainian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, whose essays on GEOCHEMISTRY AND THE BIOSPHERE we have just released in their first authoritative English translation.

There is a very real “synergy” to our selections. Our writers inspire one another and inspire their readers.  In an age of apathy and materialism, our authors challenge readers to want more for themselves and their planet and to rise to their fullest potential as mindful individuals.

Sincerely,

Deborah Parrish Snyder

Web Design and Graphics by

Elemental
&