Books

London: Penguin, 2006, 2006. Large octavo. Original purple boards, titles to spine in white, floral patterned endpapers, multi-coloured silk page marker. With the white silk dust jacket embroidered with titles in black and flowers in blue and yellow. Housed in the original printed perspex slipcase. In the original cardboard packaging. A fine copy. Limited edition, number 176 of 1,000 copies. To celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Penguin Classics the firm commissioned five prominent artists to design bindings for limited runs of influential books previously published in the series. The embroidered Paul Smith design for Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of the most popular of the series. Lady Chatterley's Lover was first published in the UK, by Penguin, in 1960 after a well-publicised legal battle in November of that year. Penguin's successful defence of the work is acknowledged as a milestone for the liberalisation of British publishing, and a gateway to the permissive social attitudes of the 1960s. 9.5" x 6.75" Penguin D.H. Lawrence 364 pp.

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.