jersey ramblings
I’m in scenic New Jersey for the holiday, which means I picked up my annual issue of Weird NJ magazine:
Weird NJ is a travel guide and magazine to places you won’t find on state funded maps or located on any tourist attraction pamphlets.
In Weird N.J. we travel to places that are seen for what they are; weird, odd or unique, all told by New Jerseyans to Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran, publishers of Weird N.J., while traveling the backroads of the Garden State in search of local unwritten history and modern folklore.
When we travel the state of New Jersey, we are looking for tales told only inside the perimeters of a town. These stories and places tell a story that cannot be found in any history books and are not often perceived as “history,”…until we arrive.
Today’s big find was Riverside Books, soon to be Riverside Books and Coffee. It’s a tiny shop crammed full of books, but didn’t seem like anything special. Then I found that what I first thought was an office was actually a rare books room, which was stocked from floor to ceiling with a whole range of occult and mystical subjects. There’s an entire wall of astrology, lots of Golden Dawn and Rosicrucian stuff, hoodoo, a glass case with a couple dozen different tarot decks, and apparently thousands more books in the back waiting for the expansion to be complete.
It’s largely of historical interest- you can find an ephemeris for 1907 and plenty of Masonry and Aleister Crowley, but nothing terribly modern except a stray witchcraft book or two. I found more chaos magic at Barnes & Noble than I did here, but there’s no telling what’s hiding in the back.
I bought Thinkers of the East: Teachings of the Dervishes, by Idries Shah, and Mystery of the Long Lost 8th, 9th and 10th Books of Moses (Together With The Legend That Was Of Moses and 44 Keys To Universal Power), by Henri Gamache.
I don’t know if I’ve got any readers in Jersey, but check the place out if you’re here. They’re very friendly, and eager to order anything you can’t find. Those of us in mystical Portland, OR are spoiled by Powell’s, of course, but this place is an excellent and surprising find for South Jersey.
