Adventures of a Bookseller

London: Chatto & Windus, 1938. First edition. Hardcover. Back-strip faded; edges foxed; else very good copy. 8vo. Red cloth. Pp. (x), 330. Frontispiece portrait by Dame Laura Knight. Includes 8 pp. of photocopied expurgations in the author's hand. Also laid in is a 12-page Davis & Orioli booksellers' catalogue of first editions, undated but probably from the late 1930s. Pino Orioli (1884-1942) was a friend of Norman Douglas, Richard Aldington, and D. H. Lawrence. In 1928 he undertook to publish in Italy the first edition ofLady Chatterley's Lover, in an unexpurgated edition of 1000 copies. Later, he had a bookshop at 30 Museum Street, London. This memoir had included various imprudent comments about his experiences as a gay man. But because such activities were illegal in Britain in the 1930s, discretion forbade them to be published and so they were excised. However the manuscript still exists, and these photocopies show what was expurgated: "Mr. Bartlett … offered me a drink, asked what I was doing in London, how long I had been there, and a hundred other questions; all this time he was caressing my hair."