1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover

Description

Early Edition, Publishers' Original Binding, With Slipcase

The second edition of this work, privately published in Florence by Tipografiia Giuntina.

This second edition is scarcer than the first edition; the first edition had 1,000 copies printed, whereas this second edition only had 200 copies printed.

Pencil inscription to the recto to the front endpaper, 'Bought from C. Lahr, a friend of DHL - Lahr received it direct'. Charles Lahr was a German-born anarchist and a bookseller and publisher in London. He published a small collection of Lawrence's poems called 'Pansies', he published it with his small press Blue Moon Press. Charles spent a lot of time incarcerated during his life due to his Communist and extreme connections.

In a custom slipcase, in a fine condition.

'Lady Chatterley's Lover' was a controversial novel when first published in a private edition in Italy in 1928 and France in 1929. An unexpurgated edition was not openly published in the U.K. until 1960, when it was the subject of an important obscenity trial against Penguin Books. The book had been banned due to its obscenity in being sexually explicitly, and for its use of the then-unprintable four-letter words. The romance in the novel was also notorious at the time as it took place between an upper-class woman and a working-class man.

Overall the novel is a love story for the upper-class woman Constance Reid, who is stuck in an unhappy marriage with a paralysed war hero. She begins an affair with the gamekeeper, and is an important commentary on class difference of the time.

This was an important novel of the twentieth century, ushering in the sexual revolution that happened post-World War Two into the 60s and 70s.

Three newspaper clippings loosely inserted, all pertaining to this novel and banned works.