Vintage Wodehouse

by P.G. Wodehouse

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140048472
• ISBN13: 9780140048476
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Penguin
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.7" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

It was a very good year

Or years, as this is not one vintage, rather a wine tasting party. The title does not immediately make this clear, and one may think that this collection by Richard Usborne is a scrapbook of long lost pieces, like David Jasen's The Uncollected Wodehouse (which, once published, was was then "Collected"). It's true antecedent is rather a collection from 1939, Week-end Wodehouse, which, like this volume, was a miscellany of the Master, mixing and matching short stories with snippets from the novels, and the occasional non- fiction bit, if that's what humorous essays are called, some as short as a paragraph. That volume was introduced by Hilaire Belloc, and had witty illustrations by Kerr. No wonder Pimlico Press reprinted a fascimile edition in 1991. That volume also included a Classified Contents noting if said story concerned the Drones or was a bit from a novel. So what has this Penguin volume got on that one? For one thing, Wodehouse wrote many more stories and novels after 1939, so its editor had a wider repertoire to choose from. At over 400 pages, it's also huge, even while combining the portability of a pocket paperback. Even glancing through the pages would probably make a novice want to read Wodehouse. Fortunately Usborne cites his sources so you can track down the book in question. He sticks so much to favorites, as he says in his introduction, that I found I had read everything in here over and over (of course I read it again anyway). So this book is ideal for the middle reader who has read a bit of Wodehouse but not all. Once you've read all, all that's left is to read it over again, so you may as well get this book anyway. As Belloc said in his intro. to WeW, Wodehouse was one of the few writers who "nearly always approaches, and often reaches, perfection."