Born in
Sheffield, England, Smithers worked as a solicitor after qualifying in 1884 and became friendly with the explorer and orientalist Sir
Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890). He was an original subscriber to
Burton's translation of the Book of One Thousand and One Nights in 1885 and published (after Burton's death) a somewhat bowdlerized edition of it. He also 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 Symons and Beardsley, he founded
The Savoy, a periodical that 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": When Beardsley converted to
Roman 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. After the trials of
Oscar Wilde in 1895, Smithers was one of the few publishers prepared to continue to handle "decadent" literature, such as Wilde's
The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898, and
The Savoy. Smithers went bankrupt in 1900, and died in 1907 from cirrhosis of the liver. His 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. == Translations ==