A Pelican at Blandings by P. G. Wodehouse - Signed and Inscribed First Edition
First edition, first impression: London: Herbert Jenkins, 1969. Signed and inscribed by the author to the front endpaper.
Octavo. Original black cloth, the spine lettered in silver. With the original pictorial dust jacket designed by Osbert Lancaster, priced 25s. on the front flap. The binding is clean and square, with some toning and foxing to edges, primarily to fore-edge. A very well-preserved copy.
The dust jacket is remarkably well kept, with strong colour saturation and only extremely mild handling wear at the extremities, otherwise near fine. Not price-clipped.
A particularly attractive signed presentation copy, warmly inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper: “With best wishes / P. G. Wodehouse / April 5 – 1970.”
A Pelican at Blandings is the last Blandings novel published in Wodehouse’s lifetime, preceding the posthumously issued Sunset at Blandings (1977). It represents the final appearance of Blandings Castle as shaped entirely under the author’s hand, and stands as a late but assured return to one of the most celebrated settings in twentieth-century comic fiction. Signed copies of Wodehouse’s late novels are notably uncommon.