While still at school, Crowley had developed interests in chess and rock climbing; his talent for chess was precocious, and he devised a manoeuvre where the pawns attack the bishop.1 The horrors of boarding school took their toll on him, and he took up climbing to build his fitness after being bullied; away from the world of school, it must have offered an intimation of transcendence.
In 1895 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge (studying chemistry, and playing chess for the university) and it was during this period that two new interests developed, in poetry and magic.
Crowley published his first volume of poetry, Aceldama: A Place to Bury Strangers In (“A Philosophical Poem by a Gentleman of the University of Cambridge”) in 1898 with Leonard Smithers, the quintessential 1890s publisher, at 4 & 5 Royal Arcade, Bond Street. He had chosen the right man. “Publisher to the decadents”, Smithers prided himself on publishing “what all the others are afraid to touch”. He published Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and Wilde described him as a publisher of very limited editions: one for himself, one for the author, and one for the police.
When Wilde's 1895 arrest led to a general backlash against decadence, Beardsley was fired from The Yellow Book (the famous decadent journal published by John Lane), but he bounced back with a new journal, The Savoy, also published by Smithers; his original cover design featured a cherub urinating on The Yellow Book. Smithers had also known Richard Burton, and published an edition of his Thousand and One Nights. Smithers had a murky reputation for publishing erotica, and some of the stock was kept under the counter in Gladstone bags, so that it could be spirited away in the event of a police raid (the drill was to take it to a railway station and leave it in Left Luggage).
With all that in mind, Smithers was again just the right man to publish Crowley's second book, later in 1898 (this time under the pseudonym of Bishop): White Stains: The Literary Remains of George Archibald Bishop, a Neuropath of the Second Empire. A tour of the perversions, it was Crowley's response to Krafft-Ebing. Peter Fryer, an authority on erotica (and author of Private Case – Public Scandal, a study of pornography in the British Library) considered it the filthiest book in the English language. It was clandestinely printed by Smithers in Amsterdam, and many copies were destroyed by the British customs.
Crowley had liked Smithers (and presented him with a copy of Aceldama, inscribed in the Malory-style mediaevalism of the era “…from Aleister Crowley, hys fyrst booke”)2 but there was later a cooling off, and there is a vicious picture of him in Crowley's short story ‘At The Fork of the Roads’. Crowley later described Aceldama as produced not by the famous Smithers but by an obscure “jobbing printer in the Brompton Road.” This was the printer Smithers had used, Francis Edwin Murray, at 180 Brompton Road, a firm associated with gay material who sometimes traded as the “Middlesex Press”, a pun of the time.
Crowley's love of finely and even talismanically produced books was lifelong. Smithers had employed the Chiswick Press as printers, and Crowley continued using them on and off from 1898 until 1944. Founded in 1789 and trading as Chiswick since 1811, they were one of the best printers in Britain. In Crowley's heyday they were in Took's Court, Holborn.
Crowley liked to get special copies of his books bound by the fine bookbinder Zaehnsdorf who were at 144-146 Shaftesbury Avenue, including some books in his own library, and he later used the famous firm of Sangorski and Sutcliffe (whose bindings include a Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with over a thousand jewels; it sank with the Titanic). They had started in Bloomsbury but were at 1-5 Poland Street by the time he asked them to bind The Book of Thoth in 1944; he also recommended them to a disciple in the 1940s as a place to find vellum for talismans.
Smithers was by far the most distinguished of the publishers Crowley dealt with in a prolific writing career. He was a key player in the culture of the Nineties, and one of the figures in his circle was Herbert Pollitt, whom Crowley already knew from Cambridge. Pollitt was a noted female impersonator, performing as Diane de Rougy. He had a relationship with Crowley – Crowley even writes that he lived as Pollitt's wife for six months – and introduced him to the work of Beardsley, whom he knew, Whistler, Felicien de Rops and the decadent current of the period in general.
Their relationship foundered, seemingly because Pollitt (“the only person with whom I had ever enjoyed truly spiritual intercourse”) failed to share Crowley's growing interest in mysticism. It ended unhappily on Bond Street in the autumn of 1898 (when at least one of them was quite likely going to or from Royal Arcade). Crowley says he simply failed to see Pollitt, but Pollitt thought he was deliberately ‘cutting’ him, “and our destinies drew apart.” And that was the end; “It has been my lifelong regret, for a nobler and purer comradeship never existed on this earth.”