Wodehouse Works and Research Resources
Sources of Information for Members Interested in Researching Aspects of P G Wodehouse’s Life and Work
Introduction
To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Society, we have expanded and reorganised the amount of information which can be found on our website pages which may be of assistance to members and others interested in any aspect of Wodehouse’s life and work.
Regular visitors to this site will be aware that there has been a lot of factual information readily available under the following menu headings:
PGW Biography
Wooster Sauce – Archive
Wartime
Reference Materials – Information Sheets, Wodehousean websites, Other society contacts and Publications.
The Information Sheets in particular listed an extensive number of separate subjects, including Books, Plays and Libretti by PGW; Novels appearing in magazines; Musical Comedies for which he wrote lyrics; foreign languages into which his books have been translated; magazines featuring his stories; a simplified Chronology of his fiction; and a potted biography.
The Format of the Revised Website pages
We hope our information pages will be of value to all visitors, whether they have a relatively modest interest in, for example, finding out the names of all the Jeeves and Wooster books or, by contrast, they are searching for the identity of institutions holding significant Wodehouse material which are accessible to the public.
Our new menu heading, ‘Wodehouse Works and Research Resources’, guides the website visitor interested in both types of research and is therefore comprehensive. (Note, however, that the menu headings Wartime, Wooster Sauce and PGW Biography remain in place for visitors who come to the website with those specific aims in mind.)
Under the new navigation menu heading ‘Wodehouse Works and Research Resources’ at the top of the page can be found the following (links are blue, bold text and should be closed after viewing to go back to where you were before opening the link; the various sections A, B, C, etc can be reached by using the list under the menu heading at the top of the page):
A Books by P G Wodehouse
A a Books written in whole or in part by Wodehouse
A b Additional Information concerning those books written in whole or in part by Wodehouse
A c The Everyman Collectors’ Wodehouse
B The theatrical career of P G Wodehouse
B a Plays by P G Wodehouse Published in Book Form
B b Plays written in whole or in part by Wodehouse
B c Libretti written in whole or in part by Wodehouse
B d Unsuccessful attempts to produce commercial shows
B e Musical Comedies with Lyrics written in whole or in part by Wodehouse
C Novels by Wodehouse appearing in Magazines or Journals
C Novels by Wodehouse which appeared in Magazines or Journals
D Information about Foreign Translations
D Translations of Books by P G Wodehouse
E List of Reference Books about Wodehouse’s Life and Work
E a Books which concentrate on aspects of Wodehouse’s life
E b Books which present the authors’ views of a broad coverage of Wodehouse’s writing
E c Books which concentrate on writing about specific topics or character groupings
E d Books which concentrate on his activities on stage and film
F Publications (including journals) by The P G Wodehouse Society (UK), including Indexes and digitised copies
F c Other Supplements published by The Society
G A Brief Potted Biography of P G Wodehouse
H Contact details in relation to other Wodehouse Societies
I Details of External Websites with Wodehouse material of interest
J Details of Institutions holding Important Collections of Wodehouse material
K Wodehouse’s Wartime Experiences - Overview and links to broadcasts
L Artwork
L a Artists responsible for artwork for UK first editions
L b Artists responsible for artwork for US first editions
L c Names of Major Penguin Artists
L d Names of Artists of selected Omnibus publications
L e Names of Artists of the Covers of recent Arrow Series and the Comprehensive Collectors’ Series from Everyman (UK) and Overlook (US)
L e 1 Swan Park
L e 2 Natasha Nel
L e 3 Andrzej Klimowski
L f A Remarkable Book about the Illustrators of Wodehouse Publications in The Netherlands
We trust that you will find this new resource helpful, whatever your needs.
General Warning Concerning Copyright
The rules relating to Copyright are complex, in part because they differ significantly in different parts of the world, and it would be virtually impossible to even attempt to summarise the rules in such a way as to cover their application to all those using this site. However, there are some general principles that can be stated, in the hope that at least some potential breaches can be avoided.
1 In most countries, copyright remains with an author (or if copyright has specifically been included in a sale, with the purchaser) for seventy years from the year of the author’s death. For example, in Europe (including the UK), the copyright in most of Wodehouse’s works wherever published will remain with the Trustees of his Literary Estate until 31 December 2045, unless they or their predecessors had entered into a contract transferring the copyright ownership to another party. In practical terms, this means that intending publishers of any material containing extracts from a Wodehouse book, his personal letters, or other publications in which his words appear, should consider whether it is necessary to obtain the consent of the Trustees before proceeding. After 2045, as the law stands, most Wodehouse material will be free of copyright (‘in the public domain’) in the UK and Europe.
2 The rule is significantly different in relation to the appearance of his material in some other countries, notably the USA. Under that country’s laws, as they stand (December 2021), material published anywhere in the world before a ‘specified date’ may be republished in the USA without copyright implications, in relation either to consents or to copyright fees.
The ‘specified date’ as at December 2021 is 1 January, 1926. This means that anything published before 1 January, 1926, anywhere in the world, is included in the US definition of public domain. For the forseeable future, the qualifying publication date will advance by one year every 1 January. Thus, for example, at any time in 2026, material published before 1 January, 1931 will generally be free of US copyright.
This is a simplistic analysis with many qualifications, and anybody proposing to make use of such material, especially if there is a prospect of making the resulting work available outside the USA, would be well advised to take specific advice.
3 There are a number of general exemptions from the copyright rules, such as where the quoted material is insignificant in quantity (approximately 75 words is generally regarded as fair usage. (That, of course, throws up its own difficulties, and its application should be considered with common sense.) There is also an exemption where the copied material will be used only for personal and academic research or study, which may apply to a number of our members engaged in research of a relevant nature.
4 If a person concludes that copyright consent from the Trustees might be necessary in the case of a proposed publication, they should contact Peter Straus of RCW at Rogers, Coleridge and White, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN, e-mail address peters@rcwlitagency.com, providing full details as to the material expected to be used and the nature and extent of the proposed publication.
General Warning Concerning Errors and Omissions
The publications referred to on this website have been created over more than a century. Readers should be aware that any information provided in books and magazines about Wodehouse’s family, life and work represents the understanding of its author when the piece was written.
Many of the books about Wodehouse’s life and work were written either towards the end of his life or within the years between his death and 1981, the centenary of his birth. These all fell in the period before the internet had been created as a viable public service, and thus ready access to material such as historic newspapers and journals was minimal compared to the possibilities today. It is therefore understandable that some books contain information or statements which are not factually correct, or draw conclusions which are incompatible with information which became available later.
Researchers using the reference books named on this site should be aware of these potential problems, and if they find inconsistencies should do their best to establish the correct factual position from other relevant underlying sources. As a simple example, the McIlvaine Bibliography (1990) shows the book Psmith, Journalist with reference A15c, as the second English edition of the book originally entitled The Prince and Betty.
While admittedly the whole publication history of The Prince and Betty is extremely complicated, the one thing that is certain is that Psmith, Journalist appeared as a serial in The Captain Magazine in 1909-1910. From letters to his friend L H Bradshaw it is clear that he had started writing The Prince and Betty at the beginning of 1911, and that he deliberately incorporated part of the plot of Psmith, Journalist into that story. Even one of our most noted commentators on Wodehouse’s work misunderstood the relationship between the two titles and perpetuated the myth in later editions of the book in which his error first appeared as well as his other writings.
Problems Caused by Different Editions of Books with the Same Title having Different Contents
Researchers should always be on the alert for potential problems caused by different editions of books with the same title having different contents. These differences can manifest themselves in a number of ways, and in case they become relevant in relation to the titles in which you have an interest, you should be aware that there are several different possible causes including the following:
1 The same name may be used for collections of short stories published in a single volume in each of the UK and the USA, but with contents that differ;
2 Different names might be used for collections with identical lists of stories, such as The Clicking of Cuthbert, the English name of the first collection of Golf stories, which was renamed Golf Without Tears when published in the USA two years later;
3 Versions of a Novel published in one country may differ significantly from the version in the other country by being significantly shortened or lengthened, or a single aspect of the plot may have been amended, added or deleted in the version published in one country but not the other; or
4 The title of a Novel published in the UK may be changed before publication in the US, or vice-versa, even where the story remains essentially the same.
Many examples can also be found where there are changes of reasonable importance in plot, character name or geographical setting between the magazine version of a Story and the Book version, and in some cases some or all of the changes from the magazine version may only have been made to the book edition in one country.