The AtlantisBookshop

Michael Houghton founded the Atlantis Bookshop on Museum Street in 1922, and it remains London's oldest occult bookshop still trading from its original site. Geraldine Beskin and her daughter Bali now run the shop, continuing a business the family took on decades ago and describing themselves as third and fourth generation booksellers. The stock runs to witchcraft, ceremonial magic, tarot and folklore, much of it out of print elsewhere. Gerald Gardner, the man credited with founding modern Wicca, held meetings of his coven in the shop's basement during the 1950s, and Atlantis published his novel High Magic's Aid, his first public statement on witchcraft written under a pseudonym while it was still illegal to practise it in Britain.