Psmith Journalist

viii+247 pages with twelve plates including frontispiece plate. Small octavo (7 3/4" x 5 1/2") bound in original publisher's blue pictorial cloth with cream lettering to spine and white, black and blue pictorial to spine and cover. (Ahern 015c) First edition first issue with "Black" at foot of spine measuring eight of an in rather than three sixteenths of an inch.

Psmith, Journalist is a novel by P G Wodehouse, first released in the United Kingdom as a serial in The Captain magazine between October 1909 and February 1910, and published in book form in the UK on 29 September 1915, by Adam & Charles Black, London, and, from imported sheets, by Macmillan, New York, later that year. The story was also incorporated into the US version of The Prince and Betty, published by W.J. Watt and Co., New York, on 14 February 1912. This combined the magazine versions of The Prince and Betty and Psmith, Journalist, and is a very different book from that published as The Prince and Betty in the UK.

It continues the adventures of the silver-tongued Psmith one of Wodehouse's best loved characters, and his friend Mike Jackson. The story begins with Psmith accompanying his fellow Cambridge student Mike to New York on a cricketing tour. Through high spirits and force of personality, Psmith takes charge of a minor periodical, and becomes embroiled in a scandal involving slum landlords, boxing and gangsters – the story displays a strong social conscience, rare in Wodehouse's generally light-hearted works. One of the earliest known uses in print of the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" appeared in Psmith, Journalist.

Condition:

Fore-edge of page 241 browned and nicked, contemporary neat fit inscription on front end paper, some internal fingering and soiling especially to the first few chapters else very good.