Books

Florence: Privately Printed, 1928. 365 pp. Spine lacking, lower corner of page one is lacking, edges of the boards are worn, preliminary page opposite the title page lacking, stamped and manuscript markings of the Superior Court identifying this copy as evidence. A pirated copy circa 1929? This copy was used to entrap and convict Boston Bookseller James A. DeLacey for Obscenity. Delacey owned Dunster House Books in Cambridge and was entrapped in a sting. The copy has two manuscript notes on the inside front cover and flyleaf. Both notes are dated October 30, 1929. The notes read, “Charles S. Bodwell saw J.T. Shaymaker(?) buy this at Dunster House Cambridge Oct. 30th, 1929, at about 11:50 a.m.” “The Bought, Oct. 30/ 29 at 11:55am from the Dunster House Book Shop, 20 South Str. Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass. By J. Shaymaker (?).” The book also has court stamps on the front board and title page. This copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an important symbol of free speech…

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.