The Edwardian artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare could be the missing link between Aubrey Beardsley and Jimmy Page. An enigmatic self-portrait  now in the collection of the Led Zeppelin guitarist  depicts the artist sitting at a table covered in necromantic bric-a-brac, which, as Baker observes, "is like peering into the window of some faintly hellish junk shop". Baker has a fine store of anecdotes  one warms to Spare serving Aleister Crowley a cake of baked horse-dung, claiming it to be "an old T'ang dynasty recipe"  though he has a harder time elucidating Spare's baffling self-invented religion. What emerges is a portrait of a marginal figure forever ahead of the curve: he's cited as the precursor of surrealism, pop art and even psychoanalysis, though Spare dismissed Freud and Jung as "Fraud and Junk". It's fascinating to imagine what they would have made of a man whose views of the subconscious were formed by the magically summoned manifestation of a giant owl.