Available Now: City Of The Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley
Good Morning!
We're incredibly happy to announce that Phil Baker's City Of
The Beast: The London Of Aleister Crowley is signed and
shipping now. Impressively erudite and caustically humourous, this biography
told through 93 London sites is published in both limited hardback and standard
paperback editions.
We're nearing the end of our run of the signed hardback special edition, so
please do order swiftly to avoid disappointment!
City Of The Beast
The London of Aleister Crowley
by Phil Baker
Foreword by Tim D’Arch Smith
133mm x 203mm
HB/PB, 304pp
ISBN: 9781913689322
Available now
Hardback special edition: £35
One of 400 copies, signed by the author, with an exclusive bookmark featuring a
caricature of Crowley by Aubrey Beardsley.
Paperback: £17.99
A topographical narrative as elegantly constructed as Harry Beck’s
schematic map of the London Undergound – an astonishing subterranean
journey awaits, taking us through the myriad calling points of Crowley’s
life, and this wicked city’s collective unconscious.
– Jake Arnott
Aleister Crowley, “The Great Beast”, infamous author and occultist, had a love-hate relationship with London, but it was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him.
City of the Beast is not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages. It is a biography by sites, revealing a man, an era, and a city. Fusing life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London’s social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Beast.
Through 93 locations, we follow Crowley searching for prostitutes in Hyde Park and Pimlico, drinking absinthe and eating Chinese food in Soho, and finding himself down on his luck in Paddington Green – but never quite losing sight of the illumination that drove him: “the abiding rapture,” he wrote in his diary, “which makes a ‘bus in the street sound like an angel choir!”
