the jolly roger
The publisher was actually Edward Titus. 6 It was this edition that first carried ‘My Skirmish with Jolly Roger’, which later became ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. In the same year another edition (of 500 copies) appeared that says it was printed in Florence but was actually printed surreptitiously in London. In 1932 Secker, taking heart, published an authorised expurgated edition of 3,440 copies simultaneously with Knopf publishing the same text in the United States in a run of 2,000 copies at $2.50. As has always been the case, the question of expurgation was far from simple. ‘I find I simply don’t know how much and how little to expurgate’ Lawrence wrote to Secker in March 1928, adding that he was ‘not sure what was supposed to be proper and what not’. He also expressed his reservations about a ‘castrato’ edition to Orioli, writing ‘if the dirty public haven’t the guts to get hold of the exist- ing edition, let them do without. Why should I trim myself down to make it easy for the swine! I loathe the gobbling public anyhow.’ In fact the text for the Secker/ Knopf edition was concocted by the publishers themselves from the Faro edition of 1930, which was probably the best of the early pirated editions. This New York version was ‘a facsimile of the original, produced by the photographic method’ and had been sold ‘even by reliable booksellers’ to the ‘unsuspecting public’ as if it was an original first edition, Lawrence wrote. Then there was another facsimile edition printed either in New York or Philadelphia (Lawrence was not sure which): he himself possessed a copy, a smearily-produced ‘filthy looking book bound in a dull orange cloth’ containing his forged signature. These references are to the versions that appeared under the William Faro imprint. This publishing house was the creation of Samuel Roth (1893– 1974), a man who’d already been imprisoned for printing and dis- tributing pornographic works (including Ulysses). 7 His warehouse was more than once raided at the instigation of the New York Society of the Suppression of Vice. A battler (like the Girodias father and son) for freedom of sexual expression, he was to be the subject of Roth vs United States , which concerned a publication called 6 . The husband of Helena Rubinstein. 7 . Roth was apparently animated by extreme hatred for J. Edgar Hoover.
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