The Leatherman's Handbook (1972)

• Published: The Traveller's Companion (Olympia Press), New York, 1972
• Edition: First edition, paperback original
• Binding: Pictorial wrappers
• Language: English
• Condition: Good: water damage to the back cover and the edge of the text block, rippling to the rear pages; creased spine and covers, edge wear.

Larry Townsend wrote The Leatherman's Handbook from inside the Los Angeles leather scene: the first practical guide to gay S/M culture, covering its etiquette, its codes of dress, its safety and its psychology of power, and treating as a community with its own ethics what psychiatry still classed as pathology.

It was published in 1972 as a paperback original by the Traveller's Companion, the imprint of Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press, the house that first published Lolita and Naked Lunch in Paris. It became the standard text for a generation, was revised as The Leatherman's Handbook II (1983) and later as The Ultimate Leatherman's Handbook, and is now a primary source for the history of leather culture. Townsend died in 2008.