Hamilton had no interest in magic, and Crowley didn't waste his time trying to explain it. Instead Hamilton saw Crowley as “a typical bon bourgeois”, fond of “good eating, rare wines, ladies and fine cigars.”
Whenever Hamilton returned to London from their flat in Berlin, Crowley would give him a shopping list. This included a particular tea available only from Fortnum and Mason on Piccadilly, a shop Crowley knew well, and a Pure Perique Medium Cut Pipe tobacco purveyed by Fribourg and Treyer, tobacconists by Royal Appointment, nearby at 34 Haymarket. The firm had been established in 1720.
Crowley was very particular about his smoking, and other tobacconists he used included Dunhill's on Duke Street, by Fortnum's, Philip Morris at 22 New Bond Street, and Van Raalte at 2 Glasshouse Street behind Piccadilly Circus, where he bought Latakia tobacco and cashed cheques.
In 1942 a complete stranger in Oddenino's restaurant told Crowley that he looked like Winston Churchill, and he liked this idea so much that he went in search of a hat and cigar as ‘props’ to complete the likeness. Having looked without luck (“tried vainly all probable places”) for such a cigar, he was walking across from Watkins bookshop, Cecil Court, to a bus-stop in Lower Regent Street when he saw exactly what he needed in the window of the tobacconist Galata at 36 Leicester Square, and was astonished to find that the man selling it was a Turk named Joseph Zitelli, “Churchill's own Cigar Merchant!!! So I got the actual thing I was looking for in the most fraternal spirit!”
Zitelli was, quite literally, Churchill's own cigar merchant, but Crowley was fascinated by him in a way that went beyond that. He saw the whole business as auspicious and perhaps of great import, and it struck him that the name was rather like Zanoni in Bulwer-Lytton's once famous occult novel.1
Fribourg and Treyer's former premises is still there on Haymarket, with its classically 18th century double bow windows. And next door at number 35 was Heppell's, a branch of the chemist Crowley relied on for heroin in his later London years.