Crowley was admitted to the British Library in March 1908. This was the old British Library, or British Museum Reading Room, with its famous blue dome ceiling, in the centre of the British Museum (now somewhat lacking in purpose, preserved at the centre of a hollowed out white space that has been re-consecrated as a temple to tourism).
It was notorious as a place for obsessive research, and when George Gissing wrote New Grub Street its distinctive arrangement of desks, radiating out in lines from the concentric circles of bookcases holding the enormous physical catalogue (then in the form of large books) made him think of a web: “the readers who sat here at these radiating lines of desks, what were they but hapless flies caught in a huge web, its nucleus the great circle of the Catalogue? Darker, darker.”
In addition to the library's more famous ‘ghost’ readers such as Karl Marx and Virginia Woolf, it was also a key site for esoteric study. Yeats met Mathers in here, before he adopted the name of MacGregor, and remembered him in his brown velveteen coat, proud but starving, copying magical manuscripts.
There is a beautiful line in one of Crowley's diaries when he writes of “that rich flavour that manuscripts only have in dreams” (which will strike a chord with anyone who has ever dreamt of fabulous tomes and magical second-hand bookshops). There is something definitively bookish about the occult, with the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, The Key of Solomon, the Goetia or Lemegeton, The Enchiridion of Pope Leo, The Grimoire of Honorius and the rest. Or in the immortal words of Robert Irwin, “One thing you can say about Satanists, they are great readers.”