WODEHOUSE, P.G. Money in the Bank.

'Written in a Whirl of Ping-Pong Balls’

WODEHOUSE, P.G. Money in the Bank. London: Herbert Jenkins. 1946.

8vo. Publisher’s orange cloth lettered in black to spine and upper board, illustrated dust-jacket by Frank Ford with printed price 8/6 to front flap; pp. 253, [1 (blank)], [2 (publisher’s advertisements)]; wear to jacket with creasing and chipping to edges with some loss to foot of spine (c. 25 x 32 mm), jacket sunned to spine and cloth likewise, rubbing to lettering, light spotting to edges of textblock; previous owner’s name and address neatly written to front free endpaper; very good.

First UK edition, first printing of the novel that Wodehouse wrote whilst in an internment camp in Upper Silesia.

Wodehouse would later write in The Performing Flea that it was the ‘only novel, I should imagine, that has ever been written in an internment camp. I did it at the rate of about a page a day in a room with over fifty men playing cards and ping-pong and talking and singing. The first twelve chapters were written in a whirl of ping-pong balls.’ (Wodehouse, p. 131) Wodehouse had also famously quipped about his writing environment, ‘If this is Upper Silesia, what on earth must Lower Silesia be like?’ Despite his surroundings, Wodehouse set Money in the Bank in the familiar world of the English country house, with the fictional Shipley Manor modelled on Fairlawne in Kent, where his daughter lived following her marriage in 1932. The novel was first serialised in America in The Saturday Evening Post from 8 November to 27 December 1941, with illustrations by Rudolph Pott. It was not serialised in the UK. The American book form edition followed on 9 January 1942, but the publication in the UK was delayed until 1946 amid the controversy surrounding Wodehouse’s wartime broadcasts for Germany.

Mcllvaine A64b. See Wodehouse, Performing Flea (1961).

SKU: 2126255