I grew up on Staten Island, which had no New Age book store until 1994 - Wizards Wonderland.

In the early 80s, my grandmother took me to Barrett Book Trade @ 16 Barrett Avenue - Staten Island, and I'd look for books on astrology, ESP, psychic phenomena there - of which there were very few. Similarly, she took me to The Book Nook @ 417 Forest Avenue, which had a slightly larger, but still modest collection of such title. The largest bookstore I knew of back then was Waldenbooks at the Staten Island mall, and I seldom ventured there. I think it was inside one of my comic books that I saw an advertisement for Johnson Smith Company - things you never knew existed or some such tag line and got that catalog - inside that catalog were a few books on the paranormal. Inside of some of these books were mentions of other titles, and sometimes paperbacks would list similar works in the back by the same publisher.I began to order such books in the mail with my allowance money, using money orders. Dorene Publishing was one such publisher - 7 keys to power was a book I'm sure I got through the Johnson & Smith catalog. Somewhere along the line, I discovered the company Llewellyn Publications, and asked for the mail order catalog, which had many such titles - once you start ordering through the mail - your name goes on many mail order lists, and I got a catalog from the Pyramid Collection as well- between these various catalogs and occasional visits to the library, I grew more and more aware of writers like Anthony Norvell, Leo Louis Martello, Sybil Leek, William Walker Atkinson, Lewis De Claremont, Carl Llewellyn Weschke, Melita Denning & Osborne Phillips. So between what I could borrow from libraries and buy from the few bookstores on the island, plus what I could order through the mail, I slowly amassed a reasonable collection of books on astrology, palmistry, numerology, and witchcraft.

Very few people even knew what Wiccan meant circa 1985, much less terms like neopagan