Description: Fons Vitae is devoted to making available works from the world's great spiritual traditions which could be of true use to a person of any faith seeking Wholeness or Holiness. Literally translated from Latin as "the fountain of life", fons vitae refers to the Knowledge which flows out to mankind from the Divine Source.

Although Fons Vitae was established in 1997, its efforts are a continuation of publishing begun in Cambridge, England in 1979 as Quinta Essentia (focused on symbolism, the arts, and universal spirituality) and the Islamic Texts Society (whose aim is to translate important work in the Islamic tradition, especially Sufism). Our wish is to bring out books which are exquisitely produced and impeccable in scholarship, which could be used with confidence by both the university professor in classes and by the person interested in the eternal verities, with no compromise to a recent soft focus on spirituality. A person seeking the realm of the sacred must have authentic and reliable traditional sources to find the sustenance required for his or her own path and inspiration.

Our work has been so beautifully crafted that we won the 1991 and 1993 Best Produced and Designed Book Award in Great Britain.

Works from Fons Vitae often become focal points for events -- Merton and Sufism: The Untold Story precipitated a congress at the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine College, Louisville, Kentucky. His Holiness the Dalai Lama requested Islam in Tibet and The Ornaments of Lhasa be brought into being. Cairo: 1001 Years of Islamic Art and Architecture and Islam: A Pictorial Essay have been prominent in the film festival of the Middle East Studies Association annual conference.

Themost entrancing book on Moorish Spain since Washington Irving's Tales from the Alhambra (perhaps even more so, since where Moorish Spain is concerned, truth is usually stranger than fiction). Mcnab's historical sketches are so irresistibly readable that they might have been lifted straight from the Arabian Nights, except that, unlike Scheherazade, he quotes unimpugnable historical sources.

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