Adventures of a Bookseller

FLORENTINE ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSELLER &
FIRST PUBLISHER OF LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
first edition tall 'squarish' 8vo. [6], 434pp., original mustard wrappers with fold-in flaps, front pane titled and with a vignette in black, small clipped extract from a bookseller's catalogue for a copy of this book pasted to head of half-title, else a fine copy in its original card slipcase.
One of 300 copies numbered and signed by the author. This no. 185. Armorial bookplate of John Stafford Reid Byers on verso of the first preliminary blank.

Giuseppe "Pino" Orioli (1884–1942), a Florentine antiquarian bookseller, is now primarily remembered for privately publishing the unexpurgated first edition of D. H. Lawrences's Lady Chatterley's Lover and for his long association with Norman Douglas. He became a close friend of Douglas after the latter settled there is 1922 and privately published many of Douglas's subsequent writings. It was Douglas who, after Lawrence had failed to find a publisher in Britain or the U.S. for Lady Chatterleys' Lover, urged him to have the book privately published in Florence and who presumably introduced him to Orioli. "In March 1928, Orioli and Lawrence took Lawrence's unexpurgated typescript to a Florence printing shop where type was set by hand by Italian workers who did not know any English, resulting in numerous errors in the typesetting. After several delays, including the time required for extensive proof-reading by Lawrence, about 1000 copies of the novel were released in July 1928. Orioli and Douglas travelled extensively together and were so close that they were known to their friends by the name "Pinorman", a portmanteau word combining Orioli's nickname "Pino" with Douglas' given name of 'Norman'. Together they wrote Venus in the Kitchen, a collection of aphrodisiac recipes that was published in 1952 under the pseudonym Pilaff Bey" [Wikipedia].