Books

First edition, number 711 of 1,000 copies signed by the author. This landmark novel was printed abroad by a small avant-garde publisher to circumvent British obscenity laws. The uncensored text first legally appeared in the UK in the 1960 Penguin edition, resulting in the liberalization of British publishing and influencing the permissive social attitudes of the 1960s. "Lady Chatterley's Lover - written in the astonishing time of just five weeks, in one of Lawrence's last great bursts of creative energy - also sustained him, as he overcame the difficulties lying in the way of an individual publishing and distributing his own book. With the help of the Florentine bookseller Pino Orioli, the handsome volume was printed in and distributed from Florence, and made Lawrence more money than he had ever imagined" (ODNB). Octavo. Original brown boards, rebacked, with most of original spine laid down, Lawrence's phoenix device blocked in black on front cover, fore and bottom edges untrimmed. Corners worn, boards a little scuffed, rear inner hinge cracked but holding, faint foxing to outer leaves: a very good copy. Roberts & Poplawski A42a.

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.