Here at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood, an intense search for life wisdom is underway.
Amid the scent of incense and soft, melodious tunes of meditative music, aspiring entertainer Terrence Moore is exploring the esoteric religious texts of the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians. College student Dikla Benjamin is delving into the mysteries of the Jewish Kabbalah. And physician Kurt Woeller is looking for material to help him blend Western medicine with the holistic practices promoted in Eastern spirituality.
These seekers are evidence of an explosive interest in spirituality that is apparent not only in mosques, churches and synagogues, but increasingly in the catalogs of the nation's publishers as well.
Scrambling to feed that hunger, book companies are leaping into the metaphysical market as they take note of an arresting trend: Books on religion, spirituality and inspiration, once a small and predictable segment of the market, are now outpacing every other category as the new superstars of the publishing industry.
Although no comprehensive, industrywide figures exist, a host of indicators shows phenomenal growth in religious publishing. Sales of religious books skyrocketed 150% from 1991 to 1997, compared to 35% for the rest of the industry, according to a national survey of 16,000 American households by the Book Industry Study Group. Ingram Book Co., the nation's largest book distributor to retail markets, reported a cumulative growth in religion titles of nearly 500% from June 1994 to the third quarter of 1996, an additional 40% increase in 1997 and a 58% rise in the first quarter of 1998.
"This kind of explosive interest in religion is definitely unique in the American publishing industry," said Phyllis Tickle, contributing editor of religion for the trade magazine Publishers Weekly. "This kind of growth for any category is unprecedented as far as I know."
The boom covers a wide range of spiritual material--Bibles and other traditional works, but also volumes on mysticism, Asian traditions, spiritual healing. "The amazing thing is that there seems to be a market for any kind of religious topic," said Lynn Garrett, Publishers Weekly religion editor.
Analysts say the spiritual book boom is powered by a potent combination of savvy marketing, a receptive audience, a confluence of cultural developments and the global power of the media to take what used to be esoteric knowledge and beam it directly into people's homes. Some also believe that the encroaching millennium is turning people's attention to religious themes.
