Took's Court figures in Dickens's Bleak House as Cook's Court, and Dickens is believed to have lived at number 15. Crowley knew this ‘Court’ off Chancery Lane – neither a mews nor an alley – because it housed one of his favourite printer-publishers at number 21, the Chiswick Press (who produced his Jezebel, Ahab and Other Poems, Rosa Coeli, Rosa Inferni, and more) and also the journal The New Age at numbers 1 and 2.
The New Age was a Modernist magazine that published Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and short-story writer Katherine Mansfield. It also published Crowley for a while: Crowley was on friendly terms with the editor A.R. Orage, a well-known intellectual of the day with interests in Nietzsche and socialism, who later became absorbed in the work of Gurdjieff. He was from the north of England, where his miscellaneously ‘foreign intellectual’-looking name was unceremoniously pronounced Orridge to rhyme with porridge, but in London he came to prefer a French-style pronunciation. In those days references were needed for the British Library, and in March 1908 Crowley used Orage as his referee for a reader's ticket.