Books

Copy 313 of 1000 books designed by Paul Smith and published to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Penguin Classics. Hardcover, bound in purple cloth with a silk embroidered dustwrapper, housed in a plexiglass slipcase. Book and cloth dust jacket are FINE, the plexiglass box has an internal crack on top. COMES WITH THE ORIGINAL PUBLISHERS MAILING BOX. GORGEOUS! 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.

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.