Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

LAWRENCE, D.H.

Item Number: 116422

Florence: Privately Printed [by the Tipografia Giuntina], 1928.

First edition and signed limited edition of D.H. Lawrence’s most ambitious, significant, and explicit work on sex and romance. Octavo, original publisher’s mulberry paper-covered boards, central Phoenix motif to the front panel. One of one thousand copies signed by D.H. Lawrence on the limitation page, this is number 450. In very good condition, rebacked. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

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 enigma and complexity of sex. The story of the physical and emotional relationship between a working class man and an upper class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex soon led to routine confiscation and destruction of any copies police and customs officials could find in both England and the United States. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books. Penguin won the case under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, and quickly sold 3 million copies. The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Japan and was not available in the United States until Grove Press brought the matter to court in 1959, over 30 years after the publication of the first edition (Roberts, 42a).