Someone - presumably editor David A. Jasen, though also possibly some functionary at Dover Publications - realized, in the late '90s, that the first eight Jeeves stories were all published before 1923, and therefore already in the public domain, in that long period where nothing was entering the PD each year.
But those eight stories would only add up to about 130 pages, which would be an awfully slim book.
Wodehouse, though, was very prolific, and had another series of stories, somewhat similar, and just prior to those earliest Jeeves-and-Wooster pieces: 7 stories about a somewhat dim young man named Reggie Pepper, who had wodges of the stuff, friends with romantic complications, but no near-supernatural valet to navigate all of that.
The Reggie Pepper stories were also already in the public domain, and PD was Dover's bread-and-butter. (I saw "was," but I think they're still out there; I hope so. They were never big, or major, but they republished a lot of quirky, interesting stuff over the years and I love having a Dover Publications in the world.)
And so Enter Jeeves was born. It collects first those eight Jeeves stories, mostly from The Saturday Evening Post and originally published between 1915 and 1921, and then the seven Reggie Pepper stories, which appeared various places from 1911 to 1915.
Wodehouse was in his early thirties and fairly well established as a writer by that point; he'd moved from his early school stories into comedy with the first Ukridge and Psmith stories, and was writing for a lot of the top magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, living on the New York side as much as in England. (Wodehouse's is a deliberately archaic, unreal, story-book world: it is a world of England rather than the UK.) So these are reasonably mature works: both groups of stories see him casting about to find comic material and trying out different premises, but all are funny and written with his customary tone and energy.
Things shifted later, but, in these stories, Bertie Wooster was not so much a general dim bulb reliant on Jeeves as he was a fashion plate whose horrible decisions in the matter of socks, hats, and ties needed to be overruled by the ends of each story. That was a thin row to hoe, so it's pretty clear why Wodehouse found his way out of it - but he makes it work for the course of these stories.
Reggie was even less defined, just a first-person voice that was vaguely aristocratic in that Wodehouse way, young and upstanding and silly. His background shifts back and forth across the Atlantic during the stories: he's English in most of them, but American for at least one in the middle. He's also resident variously in London and New York with no explanation. (The Jeeves stories take place primarily in New York, but that's built into the premise and explained: I assume that means Wodehouse learned from the Reggie pieces and set out to be a bit more consistent the next time.)
Organizing the book with Jeeves before Reggie tends to put the good stuff up front; the Reggie stories are clearly more minor, decent work but eventually a dead end in Wodehouse's career. Oh, it's all breezy Wodehouse fun, so I don't recommend stopping in the middle, but anyone coming to this book should know that Reggie is just inherently less interesting than Bertie, though his plots get more convoluted and his stories tend to end with more of a snapper.
I believe the Jeeves stories have also been collected, at least once, in a big omnibus of all the short Jeeves-and-Wooster work: anyone who wants a deeper dive should look for one of those books. But this one is cheap, available, fun, and does everything it says it will.
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