LONDON — A paperback copy of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” used by the judge in the book’s landmark U.K. obscenity trial is expected to sell at auction for up to 15,000 pounds ($20,000).
Penguin Books was prosecuted in 1960 for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s novel, a landmark in the frank literary depiction of sexuality.
A prosecution lawyer infamously asked in court whether it was “a book that you would … wish your wife or your servants to read?” Jurors found Penguin not guilty, and the case came to be seen as a sign of changing social mores.
The copy being sold by Sotheby’s on Oct. 30 in London comes with a damask bag hand-stitched by the wife of Judge Lawrence Byrne so that press photographers could not snap the judge with the scandalous tome.
The Associated Press