Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Florence: Privately Printed, 1928. 8vo. Original mulberry-coloured boards with white paper label to spine and design printed in black to upper board. Unopened and uncut. In the rare plain cream dust jacket. In collector’s brown leather-backed box.
First edition, number 771 of 1000 copies signed by Lawrence.
The jacket with some nicks to edges [see photos]. Handwritten paper label professionally removed from jacket spine [see photo]. Jacket in mylar.
The book is uncut and in fine condition with so to say no signs of wear.
Connolly-List 57.
Cyril Connolly: «The Modern Movement. 100 Key Books from England, France and America 1880.1950»:
«Mr Lawrence has moments of greatness, of course, but hours of something very different’ wrote Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader). His ‘passionate messianic’ didacticism mars many of his novels and is kept under better control in the long-short stories or short novels (The Fox, St Mawr, and The Man who Died). It mars Lady Chatterley, which is a puritanical tract on the art of love as Lawrence imagined it, devised to rouse the English from their torpor. Lawrence fully intended to shock and expected his book to be banned. The time-bomb only recently exploded when the issue of the trial ended censorship in England. Should be read in conjunction with his letters (edited by Aldous Huxley). Even without the eroticism it is a fascinating and well-planned novel rich in post-war observation and character portrait.»