the book collector
Orioli, who had links to the celebrated printing firm Tipografia Giuntina in Florence, founded by Leo Olschki. 3 Thus it was that the first edition in any form of Lady Chatterley’s Lover came to be printed in Florence in 1928, in an edition of one thousand copies, on ‘mulberry-coloured paper boards, printed in black on upper cover’, with the top edges rough-trimmed and the fore and bottom edges untrimmed. 4 It was priced at £ 2 in Britain and $10 in the US. Various friends of Lawrence, including Aldous Huxley and Richard Aldington, acted as agents for its distribution. Orders (and cash) went to Lawrence: the books were despatched from the printers. The recommendation of people like Huxley together with the thrill caused by rumours of police raids were better than any advertisement. The ‘1,000 edition’ sold well and Lawrence quickly followed it up with a ‘cheap paper issue’ of 200 copies in the same year that was priced at 21s. 5 A top-shelf novel, a sensational novel, a novel by a famous author unprotected by the laws of copyright was a novel ripe for piracy. The pirates fell upon it with joy. The ‘very funereal volume’ Lawrence held in his hand was the third pirated American edition he’d come across: the first ‘stolen edition’, he discovered, had appeared in New York almost within a month of the first ‘genuine copies’ being issued in Italy, and was sold for fifteen dollars as opposed to the ten dollar price of the Florence edition. In 1929, in order to combat the pirates, Lawrence wrote an introduction to a popular edition of 3,000 copies, published in Paris at 60 francs. Neither place nor imprint is stated in the book. 3 . Olschki had been born into a family of Jewish typographers in East Prussia but moved to Italy, managing a German bookshop in Verona in 1883 before founding a publishing firm, Casa Editrice Leo S. Olschki, three years later and making Florence his permanent home, returning there in 1921 after a period in neutral Switzerland during the First World War. The firm is still going strong. 4 . The standard bibliography of Lawrence, which I will refer to as ‘Roberts’ is A Bibliography of D.H. Lawrence, Third Edition, warren roberts and Paul Poplawski, Cambridge University Press 2001. 5 . A third man was involved in Britain, S.S. Koteliansky, a Russian who was the business manager of The Adelphi. He and Aldington apparently held a stock of the book that the police never got wind of. In October 2018 the Edinburgh auction house, Lyon & Turnbull, sold a cheque in Lawrence’s favour dated 10 August 1928 for £ 5.2.0 drawn on the Midland Bank (Rochester Row branch).
672
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter