INTRODUCTION

This trackless desert of print which we see before us, winding on and on into the purple distance, represents my first Omnibus Book: and I must confess that, as I contemplate it, I cannot overcome a slight feeling of chestiness, just the faint beginning of that offensive conceit against which we authors have to guard so carefully. I mean, it isn’t everyone … I mean to say, an Omnibus Book … Well, dash it, you can’t say it doesn’t mark an epoch in a fellow’s career and put him just a bit above the common herd. P. G. Wodehouse, O.B. Not such a very distant step from P. G. Wodehouse, O.M.

Mingled with this pride there is a certain diffidence. Hitherto, I have administered Jeeves and Bertie to the public in reasonably small doses, spread over a lapse of time. (Fifteen years, to be exact.) How will my readers react to the policy of the Solid Slab?

There is, of course, this to be said for the Omnibus Book in general and this one in particular. When you buy it, you have got something. The bulk of this volume makes it almost the ideal paper-weight. The number of its pages assures its possessor of plenty of shaving paper on his vacation. Placed upon the waist-line and jerked up and down each morning, it will reduce embonpoint and strengthen the abdominal muscles. And those still at their public school will find that between – say Caesar’s Commentaries in limp cloth and this Jeeves book there is no comparison as a missile in an inter-study brawl.

The great trouble with a book like this is that the purchaser is tempted to read too much of it at one time. He sees this hideous mass confronting him and he wants to get at it and have done with it. This is a mistake. I would not recommend anyone to attempt to finish this volume at a sitting. It can be done – I did it myself when correcting the proofs – but it leaves one weak and is really not worth doing just for the sake of saying you have done it.

Take it easy. Spread it out. Assimilate it little by little. Here, for instance, is a specimen day’s menu, as advocated by a well-known West End physician.

Should insomnia supervene, add ten minutes of one of the other stories.

I find it curious, now that I have written so much about him, to recall how softly and undramatically Jeeves first entered my little world. Characteristically, he did not thrust himself forward. On that occasion, he spoke just two lines.

The first was:

‘Mrs. Gregson to see you, sir.’

The second:

‘Very good, sir, which suit will you wear?’

That was in a story in a volume entitled THE MAN WITH TWO LEFT FEET. It was only some time later, when I was going into the strange affair which is related under the title of ‘The Artistic Career of Corky’, that the man’s qualities dawned upon me. I still blush to think of the off-hand way I treated him at our first encounter.

One great advantage in being a historian to a man like Jeeves is that his mere personality prevents one selling one’s artistic soul for gold. In recent years I have had lucrative offers for his services from theatrical managers, motion-picture magnates, the proprietors of one or two widely advertised commodities, and even the editor of the comic supplement of an American newspaper, who wanted him for a ‘comic strip’. But, tempting though the terms were, it only needed Jeeves deprecating cough and his murmured ‘I would scarcely advocate it, sir,’ to put the jack under my better nature. Jeeves knows his place, and it is between the covers of a book.

A sudden thought comes to me at this point and causes me a little anxiety. Never having been mixed up in this Omnibus Book business before, I am ignorant of the rules of the game. And what is worrying me is this – Does the publication of an Omnibus Book impose a moral obligation on the author, a sort of gentleman’s agreement that he will not write any more about the characters included in it? I hope not, for as regards Jeeves and Bertie all has not yet been told. The world at present knows nothing of Young Thos and his liver-pad, of the curious affair of old Boko and the Captain Kidd costume, or of the cook Anatole and the unwelcome birthday present. Nor has the infamy wrought by Tuppy Glossop upon Bertie been avenged.

Before we go any further, I must have it distinctly understood that the end is not yet.

The end certainly was not yet. Indeed, it would be difficult to think of an end that was less yetter. Since those words were written – thirty-five years ago come Lammas Eve – the Messrs. Herbert Jenkins Ltd. have published nine full-length Jeeves novels and at any moment I may be starting on another. It just shows how easily one can become an addict. You tell yourself that you can take Jeeves stories or leave them alone, that one more can’t possibly hurt you, because you know you can pull up whenever you feel like it, but it is merely wishful thinking. The craving has gripped you and there is no resisting it. You have passed the point of no return.

Taking typewriter in hand to tack on these few words to the Introduction of the 1931 edition, I must confess that a blush mantles my cheek as I read that bit about selling one’s soul for gold. It is true that Jeeves has not appeared in a comic strip, but when the B.B.C. wanted to do him on Television, I did not draw myself to my full height and issue a cold nolle prosequi; I just asked them how much gold they had in mind. And now Guy Bolton and I have celebrated the fiftieth year of our collaboration by writing a Jeeves musical, making the twenty-first of these merry melanges of mirth and music which we have done together. One’s views change with the years. One loses one’s … what is it, Jeeves? Austerity, I fancy, is the word for which you are groping, sir. That’s right, thank you, Jeeves. Not at all, sir. Yes, one tends to lose one’s austerity, and today I should not object very strongly if someone wanted to do JEEVES ON ICE. But I still feel, as I felt when I wrote the original Introduction, that his place is between the covers of a book.

P. G. WODEHOUSE