The idea of Bloomsbury now has a rather refined and genteel ring to it, largely due to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, but this was not always the case. It once had a more ambiguous character, where cheap lodgings1 and sometimes down-at-heel scholarship met the slumminess of St. Giles, where Centre Point is now. This had long been notorious – it is the setting of Hogarth's Gin Lane, with the distinctive antique-pagan spire of Hawksmoor's St. George's Bloomsbury in the background, modelled on the mausoleum at Halicarnassus – and in more recent times it was home to Madeline Montalban, “the witch of St Giles”. Writing to a friend from Marseilles in 1930, the artist Edward Burra says “I am surrounded by so many negroes and dwarfs that I can hardly believe I am not in the heart of old Bloomsbury.” Add the proximity of the British Museum and the bookishness of the area, and it adds up to the kind of richly marginal area that suits occult business ventures.
One of London's best known occult bookshops (now at 49A Museum Street, along the road from the former site of Mandrake Press), Atlantis was an important venue for Crowley to sell books in the 1930s and 1940s. Founded by Michael Houghton in 1922, it was originally round the corner at 14 Bury Street (now the London Review of Books shop, in the renamed Bury Place; Houghton moved to Museum Street around 1940). Crowley had plans for a small press there in the Thirties, variously imagined as the “Brazen Head Publishers, 14 Bury Street”, the “Banyan Press, c/o Atlantis Bookshop 14 Bury Street”, along with “The Apocalypse Bookshop 41a Museum Street”, adjoining Mandrake Press. His plans have a nice ring to them: “At the Sign of the Beast 666 / Magickal and Occult Booksellers / New and Secondhand / The Trade Supplied”.
Timothy d’Arch Smith knew Houghton slightly and remembers him as “almost a dwarf, his demeanour exactly comparable with that of Grumpy in Snow White.” Atlantis sometimes figures in Crowley's diary just as “Mike” or “Mike's”, with notes of how many books taken, although Crowley was never over-fond of him. In 1934 he wrote a limerick
A dwarf kike, who called himself Houghton!
– His balls, in his boyhood, were caught on
His mother's false teeth
In a foul slum in Leith
She stewed them with truffles and Corton.
Corton is a Burgundy, and a kike is someone who is Jewish. He notes “This was impromptu, a challenge by Tom Driberg, C.K. Ogden, and McGregor Reid. Line 1 was ‘given’ me. Idea all right, but Corton is a bad rime. I don't know if the incident described is authentic.” It is a bad rhyme if Corton is given its proper French pronunciation. It doesn't reflect well on Driberg – later to be a prominent Labour politician – if he really gave Crowley that first line.
Houghton, whose original name seems to have been Hurvitz or Hurwitz, always tended to bring out Crowley's casual anti-Semitism: “These low Jew thieves justify Der Sturmer” 2 he wrote to German disciple Karl Germer in May 1937, and as late as June 1944, after more dealings with Houghton, he wrote in his diary “Oh God! Send us a Hitler!”
There was a loose occult scene around Atlantis, and Crowley met people there including Jean Michaud, a musician with an interest in Rosicrucianism. Based at 40 Langham Street, Fitzrovia, he also headed a London group called The Order of the Hidden Masters, and went off with Houghton's wife. In the late Thirties, years after his disastrous relationship with Crowley had ended, Victor Neuburg was in the shop with his partner Runia Tharp, looking at secondhand books, when he suddenly moved closer to her. As quietly as possible he said “Let's leave”, and when they got outside she saw he'd gone white. He'd just seen Crowley: “He was standing looking at books. Almost next to us. I don't think he saw me.” It was the last time Neuburg ever saw him.
Crowley already had a history with the Bury Place shop even before Houghton, because it had been the Bury Street Buddhist Bookshop, a pioneering venture established by Lieut.-Colonel Ernest Rost, R.J. Jackson, and Col. J.R. Pain, where Crowley had a run-in of some kind with the management; possibly over money, or perhaps a reluctance to stock his books. Bury Place was the Atlantis Crowley knew best, but he knew Houghton had moved and in February 1943 he writes to a friend, Noel Fitzgerald “Mike still thieving in Museum Street, I believe.”
Crowley also knew the Oriental booksellers that were once a feature of the area – Arthur Calder-Marshall writes of “the Oriental bookshops by the British Museum with their latent mystery as if they were the beginning of a story by Algernon Blackwood” – and along with Goldston's there was Luzac's, which was at number 46 Great Russell Street (now Jarndyce bookshop) from 1890 to 1986, and Probsthain's, still there at number 41. In 1910 Probsthain's distributed Crowley's Richard Burton-influenced, homo-erotic, Persian-style verses Bagh-i-Muattar (The Scented Garden).
Also in the area, along with the Mandrake Press and the bookshops, is the Plough pub, which Crowley drank in (it is mentioned very occasionally in the diaries). It was a moderately Bohemian pub between the wars, sometimes known as the Plug, for obvious reasons, or the Baby's Bottom, perhaps because the outside was painted a fleshy pink.