<P> The Yellow Book was a British quarterly literary periodical that was published in London from 1894 to 1897 . It was published at The Bodley Head Publishing House by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and later by John Lane alone, and edited by the American Henry Harland . The periodical was priced at 5 shillings and lent its name to the "Yellow Nineties", referring to the decade of its operation . </P> <P> It was a leading journal of the British 1890s; to some degree associated with Aestheticism and Decadence, the magazine contained a wide range of literary and artistic genres, poetry, short stories, essays, book illustrations, portraits, and reproductions of paintings . Aubrey Beardsley was its first art editor, and he has been credited with the idea of the yellow cover, with its association with illicit French fiction of the period . He obtained works by such artists as Charles Conder, William Rothenstein, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, and Philip Wilson Steer . The literary content was no less distinguished; authors who contributed were: Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, "Baron Corvo", Ernest Dowson, George Gissing, Sir Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Richard Le Gallienne, Charlotte Mew, Arthur Symons, H.G. Wells, William Butler Yeats and Frank Swettenham . </P> <P> Though Oscar Wilde never published anything within its pages, it was linked to him because Beardsley had illustrated his Salomé and because he was on friendly terms with many of the contributors . Moreover, in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a major corrupting influence on Dorian is "the yellow book" which Lord Henry sends over to amuse him after the suicide of his first love . This "yellow book" is understood by critics to be À rebours by Joris - Karl Huysmans, a representative work of Parisian decadence that heavily influenced British aesthetes like Beardsley . Such books in Paris were wrapped in yellow paper to alert the reader to their lascivious content . It is not clear, however, whether Dorian Gray is the direct source for the review's title . Wilde was purported to have been carrying a copy of the first "Yellow Book" when he was arrested, at the Cadogan Hotel, in 1895, though in fact it was a copy of Pierre Louÿs's racy, yellow - bound novel Aphrodite . </P> <P> Soon after Wilde was arrested Beardsley was dismissed as the periodical's art editor; his post taken over by the publisher, John Lane, assisted by another artist, Patten Wilson . Although critics have contended that the quality of its contents declined after Beardsley left and that The Yellow Book became a vehicle for promoting the work of Lane's authors, a remarkably high standard in both art and literature was maintained until the periodical ceased publication in the spring of 1897 . A notable feature was the inclusion of work by women writers and illustrators, among them Ella D'Arcy and Ethel Colburn Mayne (both also served as Harland's subeditors), George Egerton, Charlotte Mew, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Ada Leverson, Netta and Nellie Syrett, and Ethel Reed . </P>

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