The government announced in May that it would prevent the copy from leaving Britain in the hope that a British buyer would match the auction price.

Hayden Phillips , the chairman of the independent Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, said in a statement at the time that “the prosecution of Penguin Books for publishing ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was one of the most important criminal trials of the 20th century.”

“Judge Byrne’s copy of the novel, annotated by him and his wife, may be the last surviving contemporary ‘witness’ who took part in the proceedings,” Mr. Phillips added.

Exporting artworks and some other cultural items that are more than 50 years old requires a special license in Britain, and the review committee concluded that “the departure of the book from the U.K. would be a misfortune because of its close connection to our history and national life.”

Lawrence, one of Britain’s most celebrated modernist writers, did not live long enough to see “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” prevail in the British courts. The book had been published in Italy in 1928 but was long banned in its unexpurgated form in Britain and in the United States. Lawrence died in 1930 .

After a change in British obscenity law in 1959 , Penguin Books decided to publish a paperback edition, knowing that it was likely to become a test case. The trial in London in 1960 lasted for six days, and “raised such a furor of clashing opinion as has been experienced only once or twice since the war,” the writer Jan Morris noted in The New York Times after its conclusion.

The lead prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, was mocked for the social assumptions revealed by his opening statement in which he asked: Would you “approve of your young sons, young daughters — because girls can read as well as boys — reading th is book?”