Editor’s Preface

P. G. Wodehouse was an incredibly prolific writer who sold short stories to various publications around the world for the bulk of his career. His stories were also often anthologized later in larger collections like Carry on Jeeves or The Inimitable Jeeves.

As a result of this practice, variations⁠—sometimes extreme⁠—exist between the published versions of the stories. They were adapted for differences between British and American audiences, titles were changed and, in the case of the anthologies, whole paragraphs were added or deleted to create a more consistent internal flow. Wodehouse was also known to rewrite stories with entirely new characters in order to resell the content. In this anthology we have attempted to include the most recently published versions of the texts that are in the public domain⁠—subsequent versions may indeed have further revisions.

Most of the stories are, despite a paragraph or two, relatively unchanged from their original form. Stories that were split into chapters for publication in The Inimitable Jeeves have been recombined and published under their original titles, with a notable exception being “Aunt Agatha Makes a Bloomer.” It was originally published in April 1922 in The Strand Magazine as “Aunt Agatha Takes the Count.” Then a few months later, in October 1922, it was republished in Cosmopolitan as “Aunt Agatha Makes a Bloomer,” having been extensively rewritten and certain key plot elements changed. That version was split to make up two chapters in the 1922 The Inimitable Jeeves: “Aunt Agatha Speaks Her Mind” and “Pearls Mean Tears.” This revised version is reproduced here, recombined and titled “Aunt Agatha Makes a Bloomer.”

As many of the later stories are drawn from The Inimitable Jeeves, they are presented in the order they appeared in that volume. The rest are ordered by the date they first appeared in magazine form.