If you’ve never visited an occult bookshop, you might possibly harbor some suspicions about whether an ordinary, non-witchy, Patagonia-clad Seattleite would even be welcome in such a shop at all. Robert Anderson, owner of the University District’s Edge of the Circle Books, wants to put those fears to rest.
“Every nice person is welcome to come in,” Anderson says. He’s encountered nervous potential customers who ask whether Christians are welcome in Edge of the Circle, or if their beliefs would be mocked. “I am not here to do any harm, or to offend people,” Anderson promises. He adds, “I’m just trying to be here to provide for people what they want and need.”
Anderson explains that the shop that became Edge of the Circle Books started out as Shamanic Convergence, “a shack on 14th and Union, which has since been torn down,” sometime in the 1980s. A regular customer of the shop, Anderson started working there a year after it was renamed Edge of the Circle in 1992. In 1994, the store moved a few blocks away to its longtime home on Capitol Hill, at the corner of East Pike Street and Boylston Avenue. Anderson bought the business in 1995, and he shepherded its move away from Capitol Hill’s rising rents to its current home in the University District, a few doors down from the Neptune Theatre, in 2015.
On its website, Edge of the Circle Books refers to itself as “Seattle’s resource for Paganism & the Occult.” But the more apt description is actually a mission statement at the bottom of the home page: “Edge of the Circle Books strives to be everything that you could want in a Magickal Pagan store.” It’s that customer-centric promise which really gets to the heart of what Anderson’s shop is all about.
On Edge of the Circle’s bookshelves, you can find books relating to just about every major belief system, from Wicca to Nordic mythology to Afrodiasporic faiths to Santeria to Appalachian folk magic. There are guides to taking spiritual baths and taxonomies of all the angels in heaven. You can browse guidebooks for most forms of divination from astrology to palmistry to tarot cards.
“I have a lot, and I mean a lot, of tarot card decks,” Anderson says, adding that it’s “probably the widest selection of tarot out of anybody in the Greater Seattle area,” ranging from the popular decks you can find at other bookstores to rare examples from Il Meneghello Edizioni, an Italian publisher which describes itself as “the last artisans of tarot in the world.” Anderson explains that Il Meneghello’s “decks are made according to older practices. They make historical reproduction decks and other things, and they’re just wonderful.”