Books

First edition, first impression, of Crowley's first published novel, a semi-autobiographical story of drug addiction vaunting the curative properties of the Abbey of Thelema. Written in less than a month and attacked upon publication in the Sunday Express as "a book for burning", the Diary became a classic of its genre. Crowley began dictating the novel on 4 June 1922 and finished on 1 July. Symonds, Crowley's biographer, praised the work as "a good effort. Crowley had reserves of strength and creativeness. Three months earlier he had been almost dead from heroin poisoning" p. 193). The author himself, in his Confessions, revealed: "I have myself made extensive and elaborate studies of the effects of indulgence in stimulants and narcotics"(Crowley, p. 490). The Diary is a report on some of his conclusions, presented in the form of a love story between Sir Peter and Lady Pendragon, their struggle with heroin and cocaine addiction, and their final recovery thanks to Lamus's magical techniques. "The Diary of a Drug Fiend, which presents an idealized and, at times, tempting picture of [Crowley's] abbey - his depictions of the surrounding scenery contain some of his best writing - is based on the idea that through magick and Thelema, one could learn to take or leave drugs as one willed" (Lachman, p. 226). The book very quickly sold out its first run of 3,000 copies. Deeply impressed with the novel, Collins urged Crowley to write an autobiography, his future Confessions. Later, following the onslaughts in the Sunday Express, he allowed the book to go out of print. Other contemporary reviewers, however, had already recognized Crowley's "effervescent imagination" and "exuberant diction. the book teems both with an immense fertility of incidents and idea; and with an amazingly rich crop of rhetoric" (Times Literary Supplement, 16 November 1922). Yorke 50a; Fuller, Bibliotheca Crowleyana, 50a. Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley. Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World, 2014; Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, 1989; John Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley, 1952; James Douglas, The Sunday Express, 19 November 1922. Octavo. Original blue cloth, lettering and publisher's device to spine and front cover in red. Spine ends a little creased, extremities rubbed, the binding overall square and sound, offsetting to endpapers, contents clean; a very good copy indeed.