Leonard C. Smithers

Born: 19 December 1861 in Sheffield, England.

Died: 19 December 1907 in Parson's Green, London, England.

Leonard Charles Smithers was a London publisher associated with the Decadent movement.

Born in Sheffield, Smithers worked as a solicitor, qualifying in 1884, and became friendly with the explorer and Orientalist Sir Richard Francis Burton. He possessed an incongruous mixture of admirable and repugnant traits. Learned and generous, vulgar and irresponsible, he drank brandy excessively—although he favored absinthe—and was notoriously unfaithful to his wife. Oscar Wilde wrote of him, “He loves first editions, especially of women: little girls are his passion. He is the most learned erotomaniac in Europe. He is also a delightful companion and a dear fellow.” He was a lawyer who, in 1891 or 1892, entered into a bookselling and publishing partnership, issuing some of the most beautiful books ever produced. Admirers called Smithers the cleverest publisher in London. He supplemented his income with erotic literature such as Teleny, or, The Reverse of the Medal (1893). In 1894 he started his own successful book business, offering titles such as Sir Richard Burton’s The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus (1894), Ernest Dowson’s Verses (1896), Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1896), Arthur Symons’s Amoris Victima (1897), and Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1898).

Crowley first met him in 1897 as part of Herbert Jerome Pollitt's Decadent circle. Although finely crafted books no longer sold well—nor did clandestinely published erotica—Smithers remained committed to publishing fine editions despite financial hardship. He published Beardsley’s Book of Fifty Drawings (1897), A Second Book of Fifty Drawings (1899), and the periodical The Savoy (1898). After Oscar Wilde’s trial, he was the only publisher willing to handle Wilde’s last three books: The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), An Ideal Husband (1899), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1899).

“I’ll publish anything the others are afraid of,” he bragged to Crowley, who took the statement as an invitation. Smithers had already taught him how publishing deluxe editions can bolster a book’s collectability; given him an appreciation for Japanese vellum as book stock; and introduced him to erotica with a copy of Teleny.

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 Symons 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": He was notorious for posting a slogan at his bookshop in Bond Street reading "Smut is cheap today".

When Beardsley converted to Catholicism he asked Smithers to “destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings . . . by all that is holy all obscene drawings." Smithers ignored Beardsley’s wishes, and continued to sell reproductions as well as forgeries of Beardsley's work.

He went bankrupt in 1900, and died in 1907 from drink and drugs. His naked body was found in a house in Parson's Green on his 46th birthday, surrounded by empty bottles of Dr. J. Collis Browne's Chlorodyne. He was buried in an unmarked grave, paid for by Lord Alfred Douglas, in a cemetery in Fulham Palace Road.

circa 1898