Richard Altschuler & Associates, Inc. was established in 1985 by Richard Altschuler, a sociologist and writer, to provide manuscript and research services to professors and others engaged in scholarly work. In 1997 the company began to publish nonfiction monographs and quality fiction under the imprint Chaucer Press Books. The Gordian Knot Books imprint was established the following year to publish both scholarly monographs and anthologies that explore humankind’s most intricate societal problems, and was launched with The Living Legacy of Marx, Durkheim & Weber. Since then, RAA, Inc. has published more than 25 books by esteemed authors, for both academic specialists and intelligent lay readers, many of which have received excellent reviews in major scholarly journals and other periodicals.
Distributors of RAA, Inc. books include University Press of New England, Syracuse University Press, and Ingram.
Books published in 2009 include Identifying and Recovering from Psychological Trauma: A Psychiatrist’s Guide for Victims of Childhood Abuse, Spousal Battery, and Political Terrorism, by Brian Trappler, M.D.; Malthus, Darwin, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Ibn Khaldûn: On Human Species Survival, by sociologist Walter L. Wallace; and Watching Walter Cronkite: Reflections on Growing Up in the 1950s and 1960s, by cardiologist Austin Ken Kutscher.
Before founding the company, Dr. Altschuler taught courses on Sociological Theory, Research Methods, and Statistics at Temple University, New York University, and Queens College; edited, rewrote, and contributed chapters to over a dozen college textbooks—in Sociology, Economics, and Psychology—published by McGraw-Hill, Prentice-Hall, and Random House, among other publishers; and coauthored two trade books critical of the "consumer way of life," Open Reality (G. P. Putnam's Sons) and IC: An Introductory Exposition of Infinite Capitalism (Little, Brown) and an introductory sociology textbook, Sociology: An Introduction (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).