Something to read Y'Ladyship?...

I'm reading Lady Chatterley's Lover at the moment. It's amazing that I've never read it before now but then you can't read everything can you. I've seen the film of course but that's not the same thing as seeing the actual beautifully structured words of DH Lawrence. It's all the better for not being a bog standard Penguin paperback; in fact I feel quite decadent reading the copy I have which is the 1929, privately published, edition. If you don't know it was printed in Florence first and then Paris; not because it was cheaper to have books printed in Italy or France but because it was banned from being published in Britain. Amazing when you consider what a literary legend it has become. In fact the book wasn't published in Britain in it's unexpurgated form until as late as 1960 after the famous court case to decide its fate. The copy I have has plain brown cloth-covered card covers with no title lettering on them. Nothing to reveal its identity so that a gentleman, or a lady, could sit on a train or a bus without giving the game away that they were reading pure, unadulterated filth! Almost as seedy as drinking cheap wine concealed in a brown paper bag! I haven't got to the real juicy bits yet but, when I do I'm sure that I will only be mildly shocked by the goings on between 'er Ladyship, Connie, and Mellors the gamekeeper which are of course tame in comparison to what we can now watch every night on TV. What I can say already though is that it's quite clear that the book is as much about observations of the changing relationships between the upper and lower classes as it is about, and I quote, "this sex thing..." So if you walk in to my bookshop and see me deeply engrossed in an innocuous looking little book you'll know that I'm reading one of England's literary masterpieces and, if I don't give you my immediate attention, you'll know which bit of the book I've reached!...