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BEARDSLEY, Aubrey : The Story of Venus and Tannhauser in Which is set Forth an Exact Account of the Manner of State held by Madam Venus, Goddess and Meretrix, under the Famous Horselberg, and Containing the Adventures of Tannhauser in that Place

Printed for Private Circulation, London, 1907

NO.43 of 50 COPIES ON JAPANESE VELLUM (of a total edition of 300 copies) signed L. S. (Leonard Smithers). The history of the the novel’s publication is highly complex. Having originally offered the book to John Lane, in the event the early chapters were first published in serial form by Leonard Smithers in early numbers of The Savoy. On Smithers’s bankruptcy, Lane acquired all the surviving material for the book, including most of the pictures, and in 1904 issued a heavily Bowdlerised illustrated version of the manuscript in a handsome quarto volume: as had Smithers in The Savoy, Lane published the work as Under the Hill. In 1907 Smithers himself issued a pirated version, this time, however, under Beardsley’s original title, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, printed without illustrations and with Smithers’s usual typographic panache completely absent, was limited to 300 copies “for the use of literary students who are also admirers of Beardsley’s wayward genius”. Its chief merit lies in the fact that it makes available a much fuller text than had Lane. Leonard Smithers (19 December 1861 – 19 December 1907) , having gone bankrupt, died shortly after this publication.

First Edition

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