WODEHOUSE, P.G. Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin.

Presented to Charles Gould

WODEHOUSE, P.G. Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972.

8vo. Publisher’s dark green cloth lettered in gilt to spine, in the unclipped first state dust-jacket illustrated by Osbert Lancaster with printed price £2.20 to front flap; pp. 192, [1]; bright jacket, right corners of upper and lower boards bumped; near fine; authorial inscription ‘To Charles Gould, with best wishes from P.G. Wodehouse …’ in red ink to the front free endpaper (see below).

First UK edition, first printing (published simultaneously with the US edition), this copy inscribed by Wodehouse to Charles Gould ( 1944–2017), noting that ‘this is the latest novel, just published in America under the title The Plot That Thickened’.

After a gap of over thirty years, this novel picks up the story of Monty Bodkin from Heavy Weather (1933) and The Luck of the Bodkins (1935). The novel was published simultaneously in the UK and US on 15 October 1971, the US edition under the alternative title The Plot that Thickened.

Provenance: presented by Wodehouse to the later collector and dealer of his works Charles Edwin Gould Jr. A member of both the Wodehouse Society in the United States and the P.G. Wodehouse Society in the United Kingdom, he was the author of the P.G. Wodehouse Quiz Book (1990) as well as the compendium of Wodehouse trivia What’s in Wodehouse: Or Jeeves Has Gone A-Shrimping and the Fat Pig Has Grown Even Stouter (1989).

Mcllvaine A95a.

SKU: 2126221