Publishing
Throughout his adult life Leno published a wide variety of literature. As well as political matter he published trade journals (his handbook of shoemaking became the definitive cobblers book for the next seventy years), newspapers (he set up the first newspaper in Westminster) and non-fiction books such as "The History of Temple Bar".
It was for his poems and songs, however, that he was best known, and was most proud of. He reminisced that Ernest Jones had once said to him "Do you think, Leno, that a writer of lyrics could ever acquire a big reputation?". Leno's "Song of the Spade" was published in most European languages, to at least four different tunes, in Europe and America, and was proclaimed by the Athenaeum as "being one of the best songs we possess", as well as giving him the title of the "Burns of Labour".
His admirers included Gladstone, Thornton Hunt and William Morris amongst others.
Read more about this topic: John Bedford Leno
Famous quotes containing the word publishing:
“While you continue to grow fatter and richer publishing your nauseating confectionery, I shall become a mole, digging here, rooting there, stirring up the whole rotten mess where life is hard, raw and ugly.”
—Norman Reilly Raine (1895–1971)