In the 1970s when a fuse board kept blowing and all the lights went out, Amado Crowley – who dubiously said he was Aleister’s secret son (see FT414:32-37) – announced he would claim he’d done it, just as his ‘father’ had, it is said, caused the books to disappear in Watkins bookshop. But Atlantis Bookshop’s owner, Geraldine Beskin, responded briskly: “If you’re going to set up a myth about the place can I have a better one than that?”
Actually, Atlantis Bookshop, just down the road from the British Museum, is in no need of extra legends; it’s a big enough one all by itself, being, apart from many other things, the oldest occult bookshop not only in the UK but in the world. Atlantis is one of London’s big three esoteric bookshops, along with Watkins in Covent Garden andTreadwell’s, also, like Atlantis, in Bloomsbury. Although Watkins was founded in the 1890s, Geraldine points out it only always been magickal.”
