To step into Todd Pratum’s apartment is to enter a reader’s wonderland.
Shelves of books cover the rooms like wallpaper. Heavy volumes and children’s picture books are stacked precariously on tables. Slim histories are strewn on the bed and desks.
A veteran bookseller and former bookshop owner, Pratum specializes in “old and rare books on esoteric and spiritual philosophies of all kinds” — alchemy, ayurveda, Taoism, Kabbalah, mind control cults, and the like. Not, he clarifies, “new age” stuff; “that’s like the lighter version of this.”…