WODEHOUSE, P.G. Big Money.

Brentano’s as ‘the Center’ of Wodehouse’s World

WODEHOUSE, P.G. Big Money. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company. 1931.

8vo. Publisher’s orange cloth, lettered in orange on a black background to spine and upper board, in the illustrated dust-jacket by Harry Beckhoff with the printed price of $2.00 and the publisher’s code 1893 to the flaps as called for by McIlvaine, fore-edge untrimmed, dark green illustrated endpapers; pp. [viii], 316; chipping to dust-jacket spine ends, closed tears to folds (c. 70 mm, and c. 55 mm) and rear panel (c. 20 mm), pushing to spine ends with some fraying of cloth, spine sunned; a few sporadic light marks; otherwise a very good copy; tipped-in autograph note in black ink from P.G. Wodehouse to M.G. Michaels (see below).

First edition, first printing, this copy with a tipped-in autograph note from Wodehouse to the theatre producer M.G. Michaels ‘with best wishes from the author’ and with the postscript ‘If ever I am missing, look for me in Brentano’s. It is the center of my world.’

A romantic and financial comedy about two young friends, Lord Biskerton (‘Biscuit’) and John Beresford Conway (‘Berry’), trying to raise money to enable them to marry their girlfriends. Brentano’s was a chain of bookstores with five stores in New York and had published Wodehouse’s 1927 The Play’s the Thing, an adaptation of the 1924 Hungarian play Játék a Kastélyban (Play at the Castle).

Provenance: the M.G. Michaels to whom this copy was presented is almost certainly the New York theatre producer of the same name, who in 1926 at Daly’s Sixty-Third Street Theatre staged a showing of the play Antonia, written by the Hungarian-Jewish playwright Melchior Lengyel and premiered on Broadway in 1925 at the Empire Theatre.

McIlvaine A43a.

SKU: 2126327