W. C. Firebaugh was the author of two works on the history of inns and taverns, and also of a fine English translation of Petronius's Satyricon, the fragmentary realistic novel of low life under the Roman Empire.
The translation was published in 1922 in New York, in a very expensive ($30) limited edition, by Horace Liveright, founder of the Modern Library.
Like earlier English translations, but more completely, Firebaugh's Satyricon includes the spurious supplements devised by various early scholars and forgers in an attempt to round out the fragmentary story.
The 1923 publication includes a sequence of 100 etchings by the Australian artist Norman Lindsay, originally used in the even rarer 1910 Satyricon edited by Stephen Gaselee.
The original text, the etchings, and the Marchena supplement were all arguably pornographic by the strict standards of English-language publishing in the 1920s.