City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley by Phil Baker (Strange Attractor Press) Hardback Special Edition

Baker, Phil. City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2022. Hardback special edition. Signed by author, with an exclusive bookmark. Limited to 400 copies. 

Condition: As New

Description from the publisher: Aleister Crowley, “The Great Beast”, infamous author and occultist, had a love-hate relationship with London, but it was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him.

City of the Beast is not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages. It is a biography by sites, revealing a man, an era, and a city. Fusing life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London’s social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Beast.

Through 93 locations, we follow Crowley searching for prostitutes in Hyde Park and Pimlico, drinking absinthe and eating Chinese food in Soho, and finding himself down on his luck in Paddington Green – but never quite losing sight of the illumination that drove him: “the abiding rapture,” he wrote in his diary, “which makes a ‘bus in the street sound like an angel choir!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil Baker’s books include Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist, The Dedalus Book of Absinthe, London: City of Cities, and The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley. He lives in central London.