Books

LAWRENCE, D.H. Lady Chatterley's Lover. [Florence]: Privately Printed [by the Tipografia Giuntina], 1928. First edition. Limited to 1,000 numbered copies, signed by the author. This being number 773. Octavo (9 x 6 1/4 inches; 227 x 157 mm). [4], 365, [3, blank] pp. Original brown paper boards with printed paper spine label. Front cover printed in black with the Lawrence phoenix. Unopened. A fine copy. Housed in a quarter brown morocco clamshell case . 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 mystery and wonder of sex. Lawrence described the book as "beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self," but in England and the United States police and customs officials routinely confiscated and destroyed any copies they could find and prosecuted the booksellers. Lady Chatterley's Lover was not available in the U.S. until Grove Press brought the matter to court in 1959, over 30 years after the publication of the first edition. Roberts A42a. HBS 69119. $12,500.

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.