Books

First edition. Number 19 in a limited edition of 1000 copies privately printed for the author in Florence. Signed by the author on the limitation page. Original mulberry card backed boards with the Lawrencian phoenix in black on the upper cover and title label on the spine, in scarce publisher's unprinted yellow dustwrapper. A fine copy, crisp and clean with just a little foxing to the title label in a fine dustwrapper with a trace of wear to the spine ends and a tiny puncture to the rear panel. Internally uncut and unopened. An exceptional copy. Lawrence's most famous work but also one of the most controversial books of the twentieth century. It was rejected by both British and American publishers on the grounds of obscenity, forcing Lawrence to seek the help of Florentine bookseller Giuseppe Orioli, who arranged for the book to be set by hand by Italian printers and issued on subscription in an edition of 1000 copies. Despite being banned in Britain and America, with several illicit consignments seized in police raids, the edition sold out within six months. It was subsequently pirated and translated, expurgated and bowdlerised, condemned and confiscated until Penguin's unexpurgated publication and subsequent acquittal for obscenity in 1960 marked a significant advance for the freedom of the written word.

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.