My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

My Man Jeeves is the first-published collection of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories - in fact, it's so early (1919) that half of the eight stories in it aren't actually about Jeeves and Wooster, but feature a proto-Bertie character named Reggie Pepper.

It is also, along with all of the material in it, solidly in the public domain. So although I read the Overlook Collector's Wodehouse edition from 2006 - I'm still planning to gather all of them, even though the first two or three dozen I bought and read and put lovingly on a shelf were destroyed by a flood in 2011 - this book, and some variations on it, are widely available in other forms.

For example, I recently read a still short but substantially longer book, Enter Jeeves, that contains fifteen stories - almost twice as many as My Man Jeeves - including all seven Reggie Pepper tales and the first eight Jeeves.

The two books have slightly different titles and texts for a few of those stories - I believe this is the difference between American and British texts; I noted that Enter Jeeves seems to use mostly American texts but is not entirely consistent - which can be slightly confusing. But everything in My Man Jeeves is in Enter Jeeves, though slightly differently presented.

So I can recommend either book, but definitely not both of them. Enter is probably cheaper, and definitely longer. My Man is more "authentic," and was assembled by the young Wodehouse himself, if that matters. I was going to recommend The World of Jeeves as an even better choice for Jeeves stories - larger, more comprehensive, with a jaunty cover - but I see it's firmly out of print and rather pricey these days, so it's no longer as convenient as it was when I found it in the early Nineties. There's probably some similar book out there: the idea of an omnibus of all the Jeeves short stories is an obvious one, so I imagine someone has done it recently.

Anyway, the Jeeves stories are among the best humorous fiction by anyone anywhere. The first few are a bit more sartorially-focused than the best of the series, but still energetic and full of Bertie's great voice. The Reggie Pepper stories are perhaps one step down from that, but still solidly amusing Wodehouse, and fascinating as an object lesson of how a writer works his way into the best version of an idea.