The Gita Press is one of the world's largest publishers of Hindu religious texts and has been based in Gorakhpur since its founding in 1923. Its main bookshop is a pilgrimage site in its own right: wall-to-wall shelves of the Bhagavad Gita, Ramcharitmanas, Upanishads, and other scriptures in dozens of Indian languages and scripts, all sold at prices well below market rate.
The press also produces the monthly magazine Kalyan, one of India's oldest and most widely read Hindi-language religious publications, with a readership that has stretched into the tens of millions. Even if you have no interest in the texts, the sheer scale and seriousness of the operation — the presses running, the monks and volunteers staffing the counters, the devout buyers clutching their selections — makes a visit worthwhile. The bookshop is open to all.