Notable Wodehouse Collection Heads to Auction

Call it a happy coincidence, but a first English edition of P.G. Wodehouse’s 1931 novel, Big Money, in its rare first issue dust jacket just might make top lot at auction on May 7. Estimated at $3,000-5,000, the book is one of nearly two hundred lots from the book collection of the late William Toplis, a Wodehouse devotee who died last year, to be offered at Freeman’s in Philadelphia. It is, commented specialist Darren Wilson at Freeman’s, “a robust and expansive collection spanning the illustrious career of P.G. Wodehouse.”

Wodehouse, full name Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), is largely known as the creator of Jeeves, a sharp-witted English valet who serves Bertie Wooster through eleven novels and thirty-five short stories. But Wodehouse was even more prolific than that, eventually publishing more than ninety novels and two hundred short stories.