Maroon cloth binding with gilt title on the spine. Bound copies of the year newspapers.

We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

• Note: This book carries a £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list

The London Illustrated Standard was a short lived Victorian glamour publication full of risque and obscene pictures (please view the enclosed photographs). Good copies of the publication are extremely rare as most copies were destroyed after a vulgarity trial which penalised the officials of the publication for publishing lude full frontal pornographic images. Today, much of the London Illustrated Standard’s pictures may be seen as timid. That said, the publication masqueraded as universal mass media designed to stimulate the more debased London members of society.

Falsely, Harry Sidney Nichols (14 August 1865 – 30 November 1941 – an English publisher of erotica) was rumoured to be behind the publication. The sanitised ‘News of the World’ largely followed / aped the London Illustrated Standard to become the most widely read newspaper in the UK.

Nichols was born in Wortley, Leeds, Yorkshire, the son of glass merchant William Nichols and his wife, Mary Hartley Nichols. He went into business as antiquarian book dealer, but he made his fortune as a Sheffield publisher and printer of high-end erotica in partnership with Leonard Smithers which included such works as Sir Richard Francis Burton’s translation of the Book of One Thousand and One Nights. In 1888 they formed the Erotika Biblion Society, for which Smithers acted as printer. Under threat of arrest under strict Victorian pornography laws, Nichols went into exile in Paris from 1900 to 1908, publishing by mail-order to England.

In 1908, Nichols, being threatened with extradition to England, migrated to Stamford, Connecticut, New York City. His mistress, Annie (renamed ‘Dolly’), pregnant with twin daughters, Aimee and Marcia, followed shortly after him. Nichols continued to publish erotica until 1939, when he was committed to Bellevue Mental Hospital, where he died in 1941.[

After the Post Office (Protection) Act 1884, Lazenby together with other publishers such as Edward Avery, Charles Carrington, and Harry Sidney Nichols, moved much of their business to Paris to sell in the United Kingdom by mail order.