Henri Desbordes [Desbordes, Henry] (Amsterdam, publisher/bookseller, fl. c. 1682–1710)

Henri Desbordes was a French Huguenot printer, publisher, and bookseller originally active in Saumur who relocated to Amsterdam after persecution in France in the early 1680s. Following imprisonment for suspected printing of anti-Catholic works, he established himself in Amsterdam, where he became associated with the Walloon Protestant community and opened a successful publishing and bookselling business on the Kalverstraat.

Desbordes became one of the prominent Huguenot refugee publishers in the Dutch Republic, issuing religious, literary, and scholarly works, including the periodical Nouvelles de la république des lettres. His Amsterdam editions include Jean de La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles en vers (1685), one of the major illustrated editions of the work, produced outside France at a time when La Fontaine’s libertine writings faced restrictions there.