TarcherPerigee
book publisher and imprint of Penguin Group
Tarcher is a book publisher and imprint of Penguin Group focused primarily on mind, body and spiritualism titles, founded in 1973 by Jeremy P. Tarcher in Los Angeles.
History
Tarcher began his career in publishing in the early 1960s, putting together packaged book deals for celebrities such as Phyllis Diller, Johnny Carson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Buddy Hackett, and Joan Rivers, but changed direction after a retreat at the Esalen Institute, an early center of the human potential movement located in Big Sur, California.
Receiving no interest from the New York publishing establishment in publishing books on these subjects, he began his own publishing venture, and went on to publish bestselling books from many previously-unknown authors working on health, psychology, philosophy, and New Age spiritutality. They include Joy's Way by W. Brugh Joy; "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards; Bikram's Beginning Yoga Class by hot yoga guru Bikram Choudhury; the English translation of Austrian mountaineer and Nazi SS sergeant Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet (originally published in German in the 1940s); and The Aquarian Conspiracy by Marilyn Ferguson. He "discovered" many of these authors through his ongoing relationship with Michael Murphy, the co-founder of Esalen Institute, who also published several books with Tarcher and served on the board of Esalen for years.
Over the years, the company expanded to include nonfiction books of all types. Putnam purchased the company in 1991, and the offices were moved to New York. Tarcher remained head of the company until early 1996, when Joel Fotinos was named publisher. The firm merged with sister imprint Perigee to form TarcherPerigee in 2015.
Tarcher died in Los Angeles in 2015 from complications of Parkinson's disease.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “TarcherPerigee” as book publisher and imprint of Penguin Group. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as book publisher and imprint of Penguin Group. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16988020. VIAF identifies the subject as 23146284464815332158. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1991, 1996 and 2015.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “TarcherPerigee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.