The Mating Season

Tonight I finished PG Wodehouse's The Mating Season, a Jeeves and Wooster tale. Unusually for me (I have a lot of Wodehouse on the shelves) it was a new one.

I am slowly working on getting a complete collection of Wodehouse's works and to make it more fun I'm trying to get them all in Penguin paperback with covers by Ionicus. He's a cartoonist and he did all Wodehouse's covers in the period when I was first buying them back in the 70s. He's dead now and Penguin use different covers but Wodehouse's books always sold well so there's lots of second hand copies about.

What I've resisted doing until now is using Amazon or one of the mainstream second hand book web sites like Alibris for my hunt as I like coming across them in second hand bookshops, usually for not very much either.

I confess that I made an exception for The Mating Season though and I got lucky as a result. What brought it on was that The Book People, the only book club I have dealings with, had a special offer this month on Wodehouse paperbacks: 10 Jeeves and Wooster stories for £9.99 which is something of a bargain¹.

They weren't Ionicus covers, in fact not even Penguin so perhaps Penguin have stopped doing Wodehouse now, but I was interested: perhaps I should buy them to get "reading copies" of any of the Jeeves and Wooster stories I'd not already got and the rest could go to the next scout jumble sale. So I worked my way through the list and ... I'd got them all, except The Mating Season. No point in paying £9.99 for one then.

But by then I was hooked. An Amazon search found me lots of second hand copies and one was from the right era that it was probably an Ionicus cover. So I bought it and it was indeed.

As to the plot it's got a country house setting, mad aunts, people impersonating others (even more so than usual, Bertie spends most of the story claiming to his hosts that he's Gussie Finknottle while Gussie claims to be Bertie), engagements made and broken, village bobbies and village hall shows. So all the same old stuff really.

And that's what I love about it.

1. Here's a link if you're interested but it will no doubt expire soon.