Lady C – Bookshops
There are many bookshops in my book, especially when I discuss how the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover went on sale in the UK in 1960. A Giles cartoon in November 1960 showed a vast queue waiting for a bookshop to open (‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover on sale here’) and one policeman remarks to another that ‘All of a sudden we’ve become a literary-minded, puritanical, culture-seeking nation’. The plate section in Lady C includes two cartoons of bookshops in 1960, one of which shows a woman sending her dog to buy the book because she is too embarrassed to buy the book herself. There is also a photograph of a (mostly male) queue to buy the book in London.
Dunster House Book Shop
In March this year I visited Yale University Press in order to view a unique copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
@yalebooks Guy Cuthbertson, author of Lady C, explores an early copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover used in a sting operation that resulted in imprisonment for one unfortunate Massachusetts-based bookseller in 1929. Thanks to @Maggs Bros. Ltd. for letting us borrow this fascinating book. Lady C: The Long Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is out now. #booksellers #publishing #nonfiction #nonfictionreads #newbooks
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The Paperback Bookshop, Edinburgh
At The Paperback Bookshop, on Charles Street in Edinburgh, a member of the public acquired a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, picked it up with tongs and set fire to it outside the shop. I discuss this incident in Lady C. When the book-burning took place, there was a rhinoceros in the background – a stuffed rhino’s head that hung outside the shop. The bookshop is no longer there, but there is a sculpture of a rhino’s head commemorating it.
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Bookshops Today
If you spot my book in your local bookshop do let me know, and if you can’t find my book then please do ask the bookseller to stock it. You will find it in many bookshops. A few well-known independent bookshops that stock Lady C are listed below:
City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco
Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle
Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham
Topping and Co – five locations in the UK