The Erotika Biblion Society General Germany was a pornographic publishing imprint in Victorian London formed by Harry Sidney Nichols and Leonard Smithers in 1898. They formed their name from the 1898 nonfiction treatise of the same name under the penmanship of the Comte de Mirabeau. [1] One of their most notable publications was Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal , thought to have been written by Oscar Wilde. The venture ended in 1907, after the death of Smithers. [2]
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis. He is one of the important Modern Style figures.
Erotic literature comprises fictional and factual stories and accounts of eros intended to arouse similar feelings in readers. This contrasts erotica, which focuses more specifically on sexual feelings. Other common elements are satire and social criticism. Much erotic literature features erotic art, illustrating the text.
Henry Spencer Ashbee was a book collector, writer and bibliographer. He is notable for his massive, clandestine three-volume bibliography of erotic literature published under the pseudonym of Pisanus Fraxi.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Berneval-le-Grand, after his release from Reading Gaol on 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of gross indecency with other men in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison.
Impact play is a human sexual practice in which one person is struck by another person for the gratification of either or both parties which may or may not be sexual in nature. It is considered a form of BDSM.
Teleny, or, The Reverse of the Medal, is a pornographic novel, first published in London in 1893. The authorship of the work is unknown. There is a consensus that it was an ensemble effort, but it has often been attributed to Oscar Wilde. Set in fin-de-siècle Paris, its concerns are the magnetic attraction and passionate though ultimately tragic affair between a young Frenchman named Camille Des Grieux and the Hungarian pianist René Teleny. The novel is one of the earliest pieces of English-language pornography that focuses explicitly and near-exclusively on homosexuality. Its lush and literate, though variable, prose style and the relative complexity and depth of character and plot development share as much with the aesthetic fiction of the period as with its typical pornography.
The Savoy was a magazine of literature, art, and criticism published in eight numbers from January to December 1896 in London. It featured work by authors such as W. B. Yeats, Max Beerbohm, Joseph Conrad, Aubrey Beardsley and William Thomas Horton. Only eight issues of the magazine were published: two quarterly and six monthly (July-December). The publisher was Leonard Smithers, a controversial friend of Oscar Wilde who was also known as a pornographer. Among other publications by Smithers were rare erotic works and unique items such as books bound in human skin.
John Camden Hotten was an English bibliophile and publisher. He is best known for his clandestine publishing of numerous erotic and pornographic titles.
Charles Carrington (1857–1921) was a leading British publisher of erotica in late-19th- and early-20th-century Europe. Born Paul Harry Ferdinando in Bethnal Green, England on 11 November 1867, he moved in 1895 from London to Paris where he published and sold books in the rue Faubourg Montmartre and rue de Chateaudun; for a short period he moved his activities to Brussels. Carrington also published works of classical literature, including the first English translation of Aristophanes' "Comedies," and books by famous authors such as Oscar Wilde and Anatole France, in order to hide his "undercover" erotica publications under a veil of legitimacy. His books featured the erotic art of Martin van Maële. He published a French series La Flagellation a Travers le Monde mainly on English flagellation, identifying it as an English predilection.
Leonard Charles Smithers was a London bookseller and publisher associated with the Decadent movement.
Harry Sidney Nichols was an English publisher of erotica.
The Sins of the Cities of the Plain; or, The Recollections of a Mary-Ann, with Short Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism, by the pseudonymous "Jack Saul", is one of the first exclusively homosexual works of pornographic literature published in English. The book was first published in 1881 by William Lazenby, who printed 250 copies. A second edition was published by Leonard Smithers in 1902. It sold for an expensive four guineas.
William Lazenby was an English publisher of pornography active in the 1870s and 1880s. He used the aliases Duncan Cameron and Thomas Judd. His notable publications include magazines The Pearl, which published poems thought to have been written by Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Oyster, The Boudoir and The Cremorne He also published such books as The Romance of Lust, Randiana, or Excitable Tales, The Birchen Bouquet (1881), The Romance of Chastisement (1883), The Pleasures of Cruelty (1886) and The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. He was an associate of Edward Avery and Leonard Smithers. He was prosecuted in 1871 and again in 1881.
Charles Hirsch was a French bookseller in Victorian London who sold French literature and ran a clandestine trade in expensive pornography. He was involved in the writing of Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal, an early work of homosexual pornography, and described Oscar Wilde's involvement in its compilation.
George Reginald Bacchus (1874–1945) was an English writer. He wrote a number of erotic books published by the Erotika Biblion Society.
Isa Bowman (1874–1958) was an actress, a close friend of Lewis Carroll and author of a memoir about his life, The Story of Lewis Carroll, Told for Young People by the Real Alice in Wonderland.
Guy Thorne was the pen name of Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger Gull, a prolific English journalist and novelist best known for his novel When It Was Dark: The Story of A Great Conspiracy (1903). He also wrote under the names C. Ranger Gull and Leonard Cresswell Ingleby.
The Rodiad is a pornographic poem on the subject of flagellation published by John Camden Hotten in 1871, although falsely dated to 1810. It was falsely ascribed when printed to George Colman the Younger. Its author was Richard Monckton Milnes. Henderson places it in The Library Illustrative of Social Progress published around 1872 but it is not in the list of Henry Spencer Ashbee.
This article is about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history in France.
Valancourt Books is an independent American publishing house founded by James Jenkins and Ryan Cagle in 2005. The company specializes in "the rediscovery of rare, neglected, and out-of-print fiction," in particular gay titles and Gothic and horror novels from the 18th century to the 1980s.
 | This publishing-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |