Books

Florence: Privately Printed [by the Tipografia Giuntina], 1928. First edition and signed limited edition of D.H. Lawrence's most ambitious, significant, and explicit work on sex and romance. Octavo, original publisher's mulberry paper-covered boards with white paper spine label, central Phoenix motif to the front panel. One of one thousand copies signed by D.H. Lawrence on the limitation page. In very good condition, bookplate to the front pastedown. Available by subscription only in this private Florence printing and banned in England and America for obscenity, Lady Chatterley's Lover was Lawrence's most ambitious attempt to present his vision of the enigma and complexity of sex. The story of the physical and emotional relationship between a working class man and an upper class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex soon led to routine confiscation and destruction of any copies police and customs officials could find in both England and the United States. An unexpurgated…

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published privately in 1928 in Italy and in 1929 in France. It portrays a young married woman, Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class barrister husband has been paralyzed and rendered impotent. Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The book is a meditation on the necessity for a balance between the body and the mind and the destructive effects that industrialization and modernization can have on both.