Need a palm reader right now?  Want to help keep a small, independent, historically significant business open? 

No problem!  Meet the Swami of London’s Watkins Books.

Watkins Books, a beloved institution among the UK’s esoteric community, is located on London’s small, picturesque Cecil Court.  This is not just another New Age candles and crystals shop with Native American flute music playing overhead.  It was founded in 1894 by John Maurice Watkins, making it one of the oldest independent occult bookstores in the city (along with Atlantis Books near the British Museum, which opened in 1922).  The quaint shop with the Tarot nook upstairs has weathered the vagarities of the free market, world wars, and the Great Depression but was almost done in by the most recent recession.

Small independent bookstores have gone under left and right over the past decade.  Cecil Court is full of little specialized book shops, including the wonderful Marchpane, which carried rare illustrated children’s books.  The street’s properties are owned by Lord Salisbury, who did not want Watkins to fail when it found itself in financial trouble in 2010.  Although his name was mentioned as a possible white-knight investor at the time, the business’s rescuer was not Jimmy Page, who had opened his own occult bookstore and publishing house, Equinox Books, on Kensington High Street in 1974.  Instead Etan Ilfeld, the American owner of nearby art gallery Tenderpixels, came to its rescue two weeks before it was to be liquidated.  Watkins reopened in March 2010.

The dire consequences of maintaining a niche business during a recession were averted thanks to people who considered the store a community treasure. Another way Watkins has remained open is adaptable, clever marketing through mobile technology.  Ilfeld revamped the store’s website and hired an online marketing consultant.  The store has developed two free iPhone apps: the first, Mind Body Spirit gives the user access to the store’s catalog, schedule of events and classes, its worldwide map of spiritual events and supernatural occurrences (to which you can submit incidents), videos from its YouTube channel, free e-books, and issues of its in-house magazine, Mind Body Spirit. 

However, even more fun is Fenopalm, the palmistry app.

After an introductory video from the Swami, a friendly, bearded, white-robed, bespectacled Indian gentleman, you take a photo of your left palm and upload it to Fenopalm, along with your date of birth and gender. 

The Swami will then read your life, head, and heart lines, and access finger length ratios.  He will interpret these factors to give you a short assessment about your personality and future. 

Using this data – and this is brilliant personalized marketing – the Swami will recommend three books he sees in your future from Watkins’ inventory, along with ordering information.

The cool thing is that this is a real person, Swami Krishna, who does private palmistry and Sacred Dakini Oracle card readings at the store for £30 for 30 minutes or £50 for an hour.  According to his blurb, he is “also a healer, a spiritual counsellor and meditation teacher. With many years of experience on readings and courses in several countries, he has an optimistic and compassionate approach to all of life’s problems.”

The Fenopalm app and brief look at Watkins Books: