After a couple of stormy months in Albemarle Street, Crowley and Bill started moving to shorter-term addresses: towards the end of September 1932 Crowley moved to the Queen's House Hotel at 20 Leicester Square, and after more moves they checked in to the Park Lane Hotel on Thursday 5 January 1933, by which time things were coming to an end.
Bill's health was bad, physical as well as mental – she had to go to the Grosvenor Hospital For Women in Vincent Square, Westminster – and on Saturday 7 January Crowley packed her off to Brighton to convalesce and found himself in the Paddington area. Like several of London's railway termini, including Victoria and Marylebone, the Paddington area was by now an equivocal zone where faded Victorian gentility met transience and vice. A man called A.G. Macdonell, writing in 1933, discusses what we would now call psychogeography, with his protagonist walking the streets and trying to understand the lines where the qualities of one district give way to another, like the elusive “exact spot where the influence of Nude Picture Post Cards in Praed Street wanes before the empurpled major-generals of Petersburg Square.” 1
Crowley was walking along Praed Street, possibly looking out for prostitutes, when he looked in the window of a bookshop at number 23 called The Modern Book Company. The nondescript but progressive name would suit a miscellaneously sensational-sleazy bookshop – perhaps like yesterday's ‘Read and Return’ book and adult magazine shops – but in fact it specialised in books on popular science and wireless technology, for radio enthusiasts, with just a few spicier and more interesting items. One of these was Crowley's novel Moonchild, in the window with a display placard that said “Aleister Crowley's first novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend, was withdrawn after an attack in the sensational press.”
“Discovered libel,” Crowley wrote in his diary. Clearly the bookseller, Mr Gray, was trying to sensationalise his work: Crowley went to his solicitor to sue, and the case came to court on 10 May. Fortunately the judge had recently arrived from another planet, and declared “There was not the smallest ground for suggesting that any book Mr. Crowley had written was indecent or improper.”
He decided the case in Crowley's favour, awarding him £50 damages.