Geraldine Beskin presides as serenely as the Mona Lisa from behind her desk at the Atlantis Bookshop in Museum St, Bloomsbury – the oldest occult bookshop in the world, one of London’s unchanging landmarks and the pre-eminent supplier of esoteric literature to the great and the good, the sinister and the silly, since 1922. “My father came into the shop one day and Michael Houghton, a poet and a magician, who founded it and knew everyone from W.B.Yeats to Aleister Crowley, took a good look at him and said, ‘You’ll own this place one day.’”
