Crowley went through a remarkable period of publishing in 1929-30, consolidating his life's work with Magick in Theory and Practice (Paris, 1929) and his monumental Confessions (Mandrake Press, 1930; it had been cancelled by Collins) as well as his novel Moonchild (Mandrake, 1929).
Mandrake press was at number 41 Museum Street. It had been started by an Australian, Edward “Teddy” Goldston, who had an oriental book and print shop at number 25, but was soon in the energetic hands of Percy Reginald (“Inky”) Stephensen, another Australian, together with Gerald Yorke (Magick in Theory and Practice was printed in Paris by this same team of Stephensen and Yorke). Mandrake had come to the attention of the police for publishing a book of D.H. Lawrence's erotic paintings, and Stephensen – a young Communist sympathiser who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford – had strong feelings about the need to defy censorship.
He also sympathised with Crowley as a man misunderstood and unjustly vilified – John Bull, for example, had accused him of being a cannibal and eating two of his mountaineering sherpas – so he published his own book of Crowley's outrageous and often ludicrous press coverage, The Legend of Aleister Crowley (Mandrake, 1930), in which he also notes the “’ninetyish romantic bravado” of the younger, Edwardian Crowley's attitude.
Stephensen returned to Australia after the Mandrake Press venture. From being a Communist at Oxford he moved to the far-right, and in 1936 he was running a magazine called The Publicist, which advocated not only monarchy – not universally popular in Australia – but also fascism and anti-Semitism. He later founded the ‘Australia First’ political party, and in the Second World War he was interned for supporting Germany and Japan.
Stephensen is one of three living dedicatees of Crowley's Confessions (“P.R. STEPHENSEN, who saw the point”), the others being Augustus John and J.W.N. Sullivan. Augustus John remained on cordial terms with Crowley all their lives, and he was such an eminent artist in their day that citing him as a friend is almost an endorsement or testimonial. Crowley credits him with “practical assistance”, and John had rallied, in fairly general terms, on Crowley's side against hostile press coverage. Sullivan was an eminent mathematician, introduced to Crowley by Nina Hamnett, and it was for Sullivan that Crowley produced the memorable opinion that “every phenomenon should be an orgasm of its kind.”