

Modern First Editions
WODEHOUSE, P.G.
The Intrusion Of Jimmy
New York: W.J. Watt, 1910
8vo, pp. 314. Original green illustrated boards, lettered in gilt to front panel and spine. Tissue guard to frontispiece.
First edition,... [please click on the image or book title for more details]
[WODEHOUSE, P.G.] MOYLE, Seth
Cheque From the Frank A. Munsey Company
New York: N.p., 1912
Company cheque, hand-dated Sept. 4th 1912, made out to Seth Moyle, and signed by him on reverse.
HANDWRITTEN CHEQUE TO WODEHOUSE'S NEW YORK... [please click on the image or book title for more details]
WODEHOUSE, P.G.
Over Seventy
London: Herbert Jenkins, 1957
8vo, pp. 190. Original red boards, lettered in gilt to spine, facsimile signature in gilt to front panel. Top edge red. Photographic... [please click on the image or book title for more details]
WODEHOUSE, P.G.
Performing Flea
London: Herbert Jenkins, 1953
8vo, pp. 224. Original blue boards, lettered in gilt to spine, facsimile signature in gilt to front panel. Photographic... [please click on the image or book title for more details]
WODEHOUSE, P.G.
Psmith In The City
London: A&C Black, 1910
8vo, pp. 266, 2 pp. advertisements bound in at rear. Original blue illustrated boards, lettered in gold and white to front panel and gold on yellow to ... [please click on the image or book title for more details]
WODEHOUSE, P.G.
Psmith, Journalist
London: A&C Black, 1915
8vo, pp. 247. Original blue illustrated boards, lettered in yellow to front panel and in gilt to spine. No dustwrapper.
First edition under ... [please click on the image or book title for more details]
WODEHOUSE, P.G.
Mr. McGee's Big Day
N.p. [New York]: N.p., N.d. [1950]
10 pp. loose leaf, corrected typescript, rectos only, business card to top left of p.2. Two pages in each of five acid-free plastic... [please click on the image or book title for more details]
HILL, Susan
The Woman In Black
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983
8vo, pp. 160. Original green boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Illustrated dustwrapper.
First edition of what has now become better known in its second incarnation. The stage adaptation of The Woman In Black is a West End phenomenon, and has been running in London since 1989. Like the book, it is genuinely creepy.
Scarce, and getting scarcer.
SIMMONDS, Posy
Gemma Bovery
London: Cape, 1999
Tall 8vo, pp. 106. Original blue boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Illustrated dustwrapper.
First edition, SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR TO TITLE PAGE.
[ed. WAYNFLETE, John] BENTLEY, Nicolas; LAMBERT, Constant; SADLEIR, Michael, and others
Clerihews
Cambridge: Rampant Lions Press, 1938
Oblong 12mo, unpaginated. Original black stiff paper wrappers, lettered in pale blue to front panel. Paper stock of different colours.
First edition. CHARLES HANDLEY-READ'S COPY WITH HIS OWNERSHIP SIGNATURE TO FRONT FREE ENDPAPER.
A collection of twenty-six clerihews, with blank pages bound in at the rear for the reader's own additions. On the page headed 'THE AUTHORS' the last line of text is missing, thereby omitting the name of the author of The Emperor Pertinax.
Charles Handley-Read [1916-1971] was a writer on architecture and a collector in the field of Victorian decorative arts. He read architecture at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, and would have been an undergraduate when he bought this volume (which was published in Cambridge) on 28 October 1938.
A second edition was published in 1946 and surfaces occasionally, but the first, offered here, is extremely scarce -- especially with such a provenance.
WODEHOUSE, P.G.
Uncle Dynamite
New York: Didier, 1948
8vo, pp. 312. Original red boards, lettered in silver to spine, facsimile signature in silver to front panel.
First US edition, published five weeks after its UK counterpart. The second Uncle Fred novel.
Uncle Dynamite was the first book Wodehouse had published in the United States following his split from Doubleday:
'He blamed the move on 'the Doubleday organisation', which, he felt, was a 'huge factory' that did not care about his books. ... In England, Uncle Dynamite sold as well as Spring Fever, but in America, despite Didier's efforts, sales were not enhanced...' (McCrum)
WODEHOUSE, P.G.
The Crime Wave At Blandings
New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1937
8vo, pp. 330. Original blue boards, lettered in black to front panel and spine. Yellow endpapers, leading edge uncut. Illustrated... [please click on the image or book title for more details]
WODEHOUSE, P.G.
Summer Moonshine
New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1937
8vo, pp. 322. Original orange boards, lettered in orange-on-green to spine. Leading edge uncut. Illustrated dustwrapper.
First edition, preceding the UK edition by four months.
Serialised in the Saturday Evening Post before publication in book form -- for which Wodehouse was paid $40,000.
WODEHOUSE, P.G. and BOLTON, Guy
Bring On The Girls!
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953
8vo, pp. 278. Original black three-quarter boards, lettered in red and green on blue to spine. Illustrated dustwrapper.
First edition, INSCRIBED BY BOTH AUTHORS IN THE MONTH OF PUBLICATION: 'Lewis Pierson with best wishes from the authors, [sgd.] P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. October 31st.' (Inscription written by Guy Bolton).
Hugely enjoyable, highly unreliable account of Wodehouse and Bolton's involvement as lyricists and book-writers in the early twentieth century Broadway musical, alongside Jerome Kern, Florenz Ziegfeld, and George and Ira Gershwin, among many, many others. Hardly a historical document -- if there is a choice to be made between a fact and a great story, it's the great story that gets the nod -- but a wonderfully vivid evocation of the early days of Broadway, and how much fun it was to be there.
Copies signed by one or other of the authors surface from time to time; copies signed by both are very scarce.
WODEHOUSE, P.G.
Uncle Fred In The Springtime
New York: Doubleday Doran, 1939
8vo, pp. 292. Original blue boards, lettered in blue-on-brown to spine. Leading edge uncut. illustrated dustwrapper.
First edition, published on 25 August 1939; the UK edition appeared one week later. Serialised in Saturday Evening Post in April/May of that year.
'Uncle Fred was an afterthought, a late-1930s addition to Wodehouse's world, an irrepressible bounder of sixty-something whom Wodehouse saw as 'a sort of elderly Psmith'. ... [He] would be one of Wodehouse's most enduring heroes, later starring in Uncle Dynamite (1948), Cocktail Time (1958), and Service With A Smile (1962). But in Uncle Fred in the Springtime, he gets his name in the title, a sure indication of Wodehouse's delight in his company.'
A very nice copy in the scarce dustwrapper.
PLATH, Sylvia
Poetry 1960 An Appetiser
Hull: Critical Quarterly, N.d. [1960]
8vo, pp. 24. Original printed paper wrappers.
First edition. SYLVIA PLATH'S FIRST APPEARANCE IN BOOK FORM.
This pamphlet, an anthology of '50s writers, new poems by established poets and prize poems, trumpets on the front wrapper the inclusion of work from, among others, Kingsley Amis, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, John Wain and Philip Larkin. Sylvia Plath's poem, Medallion, is on p. 20, and had won a Critical Quarterly prize in 1959.
MORTIMER, John
The Summer Of A Dormouse
London: Viking, 2000
8vo, pp. 213. Original blue boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Illustrated dustwrapper.
First edition, later impression (incomplete number... [please click on the image or book title for more details]
JOHNSON, B.S.
See The Old Lady Decently
New York: Viking, 1975
8vo, pp. 139. Original black boards, lettered in tan and green to spine. Grey endpapers. Illustrated dustwrapper.
First US edition of... [please click on the image or book title for more details]
