The illustrated love magazine

Some time ago I bought a copy of Wodehouse's 'A Prince for Hire' from one of the stalls which live under Waterloo Bridge, Wodehouse being a chap whom I only knew as the inventor of Wooster of the small screen and as the chap who misbehaved (or worse) when caught by the Germans during the second world war. Never read him before, although the house does now run to the Penguin boxed set of the Blandings Books, courtesy of a recent Surrey Libraries' sale of collectibles.

This book turns out to be a collector's edition put together by a serious Wodehouse man, Tony Ring, who has managed to track down the complicated history of this particular short story and put it together in this handsome paperback, published by Galahad Books of 25 Cecil Court, from where all kinds of Wodehouse memorabilia are to be had. Or perhaps were to be had, because while Professor Google records that the book was kindly reviewed by the Observer on 23rd May 2003, he also records a quite different occupant for this bit of Cecil Court now. Perhaps there was a glut in the Wodehouse market.

I now know that Wodehouse did more than write funny stories about the decline and fall of the posh of England between the two world wars. He also wrote for the likes of the magazine illustrated, mainly sold through the shops of the late F. W. Woolworth. Some of the covers are funny indeed, this one being relatively tame, well worth collecting in their own right - and I dare say there are people out there who do. He may even have written for the house of Mills & Boon.

I now also know that a large chunk of the Wodehouse income from writing stories came from serialisations in magazines of one sort or another and that the magazines in question were not too fussy; it was quite OK to recycle a story which had been previously published somewhere else, maybe just doing a bit of retouching to make it fit the new environment. So in this case a story which started out as 'The Prince and Betty' was reworked into the era of gangsters, operators and prohibition in New York. I find, incidentally, that long suffering male private secretaries of bad mouthed big businessmen are not just the preserve of Agatha Christie; Wodehouse does them too. Perhaps they were a well known breed at the time.

All good fun, but a rather slight story. I shall find the book a good home, but not on our own august shelves.