No doubt prompted by the two Crowley biographies released last year, including Lawrence Sutin’s excellent Do What Thou Wilt, and Channel 4’s recent Crowley documentary, Sandy Robertson’s long deleted Aleister Crowley Scrapbook (from 1988) has been re-released as another wave of Crowley-anity seizes the zeitgeist.

With easily digestible sections the Scrapbook offers a potted history of the Master Therion, his satanic influence on rock and the allegedly pro-Nazi propaganda he wrote as a wind-up while exiled in America. There’s an interesting memoir of 666 by Alan Burnett-Rae that details the Great Beast’s day-to-day life in Edwardian London in the 1930s. While Colin Wilson’s foreword reiterates his contention that Crowley’s life work was a blasphemous reaction by a horny li’l devil against the puritanical Christian bilge he was force-fed as a child. However the major disappointment is that the book fails to deliver on its promise. The archive press cuttings and newspaper headlines are confined to a double page spread and are criminally overlaid on top of each other so that they can’t be read in full. A maddening oversight which defeats the whole object of the book.

The book is saved by the wonderfully evocative photographs, like those taken of Crowley’s scarlet women Leah Hirsig and the silent movie actress Jane Wolfe at the abbey of Thelema in Sicily, along with those of visionary filmmaker and Crowley devotee Kenneth Anger uncovering Crowley’s demonic murals there. There’s also a couple of iconic portraits of Crowley disciple and proto hippie pin-up Leila Waddell, who also features in a rare magickal shot of Crowley’s pagan ballet The Rites Of Eleusis snapped at the currently imperilled London landmark Caxton Hall.

However, when all is said and done there’s really little here for the serious Crowley connoisseur to tuck into. Aleister Crowley’s Scrapbook is destined to serve either as a primer for the uninitiated or a picturesque flick-through to add to the collection.

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