Leonard Smithers

Leonard Smithers (1861 - 1907) was a London publisher associated with the Decadent movement. Born in Sheffield, he worked as a solicitor and became friendly with the explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Francis Burton. He published Burton's translation of the Book of One Thousand and One Nights in 1885. He collaborated with Burton in a translation from the Latin of the Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus.and Priapeia, a collection of erotic poems by various writers. He also published a limited edition of the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter.

Smithers published works by Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Aleister Crowley,Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde and lesser known figures such as Vincent O'Sullivan and Nigel Tourneur. With Symonds and Beardsley, he founded The Savoy, a periodical which ran to eight issues in 1896. In partnership with Harry Sidney Nichols, he published a series of pornographic books under the imprint of the Erotika Biblion Society.

References

COPAC

James G. Nelson, "Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson". Pennsylvania State University Press, May 2000. ISBN-10: 0271019743 ISBN-13: 978-0271019741