Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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P.G. Wodehouse

P G Wodehouse is widely recognized as the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century. 
 
His characters and settings have entered our language and our mythology. The first ever collected edition (Wodehouse had many publishers in his lifetime), the Everyman Wodehouse, will contain all the novels and stories, newly edited and reset from the first British edition. 
 
Printed on cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, each Everyman volume is already recognized as the finest edition of the master ever published.

It is pig stealing time in Shropshire. After winning the Fat Pig competition for two years in a row with Empress of Blandings, Lord Emsworth's ascendancy at the Agricultural Show is threathened by Sir Gregory Parsloe's new sow, Queen of Matchingham. Always keen to help, Lord Emsworth's brother Galahad plots the theft of the Parsloe pig. In retaliation, Sir Gregory's pigman, George Cyril Wellbeloved, snaffles the Empress. While these momentous events are under way, a romantic comedy unfolds at Blandings Castle whither Jerry Vail her pursued Penny Donaldson. But Penny is engaged to Orlo Vosper who pines for Gloria Salt who is engaged to Sir Gregory who rediscovers Maudje Stubbs who has charmed Lord Emsworth, who is Jerry's employer.

Pigs Have Wings

Not-so-fresh off the tramp steamer from America, Sam Shotter settles in the sleepy suburb of Valley Fields. His pastoral peace is short-lived, however, when Soapy Molloy, Dolly the Dip, and Chimp Twist arrive on the scene looking for two million dollars they seem to have mislaid in the vicinity. Not only does Sam discover he's living right bang next door to the girl of his dreams, but he's sitting, rather embarrassingly, on a goldmine. Some rather superior sleuthing will be required.

Sam the Sudden

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

This is a collection of classic animal poems. The poems include: Robert Burns's &quot;To a Mouse&quot;; Ted Hughes's &quot;Hawk Roosting&quot;; Christopher Smart's &quot;My Cat Jeoffry&quot;; and e.e. cummings's grasshopper-shaped poem.

Animal Poems

Pongo Twistleton is in a state of financial embarrassment, again. Uncle Fred, meanwhile, has been asked by Lord Emsworth to foil a plot to steal the Empress, his prize pig. Along with Polly Pott (daughter of old Mustard), they form a deputation to Blandings Castle, bent on doing a "bit of good".

Uncle Fred In The Springtime

Monty Bodkin's pursuit of Gertude Butterwick is temporarily interrupted by his encounter with silver-screen siren Miss Lotus Blossom, who sees in him a means of restoring relations with her idol, the novelist Ambrose Tennyson. But Monty is not the only one with problems. Ambrose's brother Reggie has money troubles and Ikey Llewellyn is struggling with difficulties which would tax anyone's ingenuity, let alone his limited brain power. When the paths of these men collide, the ensuing plot complications produce a vintage Wodehouse farce involving London, New York, Hollywood and translatlantic liners. A delicious period piece from 1935.

The Luck Of The Bodkins

A collection from the master, containing The Fat of the Land (Freddie Widgeon) Scratch Man (The Oldest Member) The Right Approach (Mr Mulliner), Jeeves Makes An Omelette, The Word In Season (Bingo Little), Big Business (Mr Mulliner), Leave It To Algy (Bingo Little), Joy Bells For Walter (Golf story), A Tithe For Charity (Ukridge), Oofy, Freddie and the Beef Trust (Freddie Widgeon)

A Few Quick Ones

Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

Variations on a musical theme by a striking range of authors, among them Flaubert, Turgenev, Proust, Nabokov, Katherine Mansfield, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri, Bernard MacLaverty and Maya Angelou. Wesley Stace's attractive medley embraces musical genres from Virginia Woolf's 'A String Quartet' to Langston Hughes's 'The Blues I'm Playing'. Short stories are interspersed with interludes from longer works - E. M. Forster's Howards End, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. Here are music lessons, solos and duets, rehearsals and performances - and a whole suite of stories demonstrating that music is indeed the food of love. The perfect marriage of the musical and the literary.

Music Stories

On doctor's orders, Bertie Wooster retires to the village of Maiden Eggesford but his rest-cure is interrupted by Aunt Dahlia who wants him to nobble a racehorse, Vanessa Cook who wants him to act as go-between for her and Orlo Porter -and Orlo Porter himself who would tear Bertie limb from limb if he ever discovered that Bertie and Vanessa were once engaged. Throw in a dotty explorer, an unreliable poacher, an irascible father and the stable cat, and the stage is set for a sublime farce

Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

Everyone in Company for Henry wants to escape from something. Hard-up Henry Paradene would like to unload his hideous country house on his millionaire American cousin, J. Wendell Stickney. Wendell wishes he could be rid of his embarrassing aunt Kelly, while Kelly wants to escape her financial dependence on Wendell. Henry's niece, Jane, needs to part from her glamorous but ghastly fiancé, Lionel, while Bill Hardy, who falls for Jane, needs no convincing to abandon the bachelor state. Jane's brother Algey, meanwhile, spends his time thinking up dodgy schemes to lift himself out of poverty. Everything ends happily ever after for most of them, but only when they have been put through the hoops of a classic Wodehouse plot.

Company For Henry

Poets of all times, places and sensibilities have been moved to write about war. They have commemorated the Battles of Thermopylae, Agincourt and Shilph, and London in an air raid. They have announced the Charge of the Light Brigade; witnessed Break of Day in the Trenches; handed down through oral tradition, the Blackfoot Indian Song for a Fallen Warrior; sent a Newsreel from Vietnam. From Horace and Virgl to Steveie Smith, from the anonymous bards of ancient China to Adam Mickiewicz and Primo Levi, these poets have encompassed the entire spectrum of feeling - pride, compassion, courage anger fear excitement, anguish, even laughter. Here. in this anthology, are more than one hundred of their most memorable poems.

War Poems

Trapped in the rural hell-hole of Steeple Bumpleigh with his bossy ex-fiancée, Florence Craye, her fire-breathing father, Lord Worplesdon, her frightful Boy-Scout brother, Edwin, and her beefy new betrothed, 'Stilton' Cheesewright, Bertie Wooster finds himself walking a diplomatic tightrope. With Florence threatening to ditch Stilton for Bertie, and Stilton threatening to trample on Bertie's insides if she does, things look black until Jeeves arrives to save the day. One of Wodehouse's most sparkling comedies, replete with an attendant cast of tyrannical aunts, demon children and literary fatheads.

Joy In The Morning

A stalwart of the Angler's Rest, where he is usually to be found in company with Miss Postlethwaite the barmaid, Mr Mulliner has an endless supply of brothers, nephews and cousins who feature in the tales with which he entertains the regulars in his favourite pub. There is George, the stammerer, who finds the courage to propose only after being chased by a mob; Wilfred, the chemist, who muddles his cosmetic potions with dire results; Lancelot, the film star; William, the lover of Myrtle Banks; Clarence, the society photographer; and Augustine, the curate, who saves his bishop from disgrace at the school reunion. All win through to love and success, but only after enough farcical mishaps to supply a dozen ordinary comic novelists.

Meet Mr Mulliner

Further stories of members of the Drones Club and several adventures related by the Oldest Member of the golf club. Many old friends reappear - Bingo Little and Mrs Bingo, Freddie Widgeon, Ambrose Gussett, Agnes Flack, Horace Bewstridge and many more. Including: The Shadow Passes. Bramley is so Bracing. Up From the Depths. Feet of Clay. Excelsior. Rodney Has a Relapse. Tangled Hearts. Birth of a Salesman. How's That, Umpire? Success Story.

Nothing Serious

When O'Hara and Moriarty, two boys at Wrykyn School, tar and feather the statue of a pompous local MP, O'Hara mislays at the scene of their crime a tiny gold bat borrowed from Trevor, captain of the school cricket team. The plot revolves around the fate of this bat and attempts to retrieve it, but the real focus of the novel is a vivid portrayal of school life. Though the setting is an English public school in the years before World War 1, so sharp is Wodehouse's ear for the way children talk that everyone will recognise familiar characters and situations, whatever their place of education.

The Gold Bat

Wodehouse is at his most sparkling in this collection of stories concering members of the Drones Club. Pongo Twistleton and Freddie Widgeon may be small of brain and short of cash but they are always good for ingenious adventures, especially when it comes to falling in love with the wrong girl or cooking up hopeless schemes to make money. They and their contemporaries populate a series of vignettes in which the plot-twists keep you on your toes while the jokes keep on coming.

Young Men In Spats

Freddie Widgeon wants the money to buy shares in a coffee plantation in Kenya so that he can marry Sally Foster. Soapy and Dolly Molloy want to get their hands on a cache of stolen jewels hidden in the house of Freddie's neighbour in the suburb of Valley Fields. When their paths cross, the ensuing misunderstandings lead to vintage Wodehouse comedy.

Ice in the Bedroom

A collection of stories featuring familiar Wodehouse characters includes Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge and his fearsome Aunt Julia, Bingo Little and his wife, romantic novelist Rosie M. Banks, twin Mulliner brothers George (the screenwriter) and Alfred (the conjuror),Galahad Threepwood, dotty Lord Emsworth and his younger son Freddie, the dog-biscuit salesman. In between stories, their creator explores some of the more extraordinary items in the American news of his day.

Plum Pie

In this comic novel - dedicated to Douglas Fairbanks, who starred in the stage version - Jimmy Pitt, man-about-town and former newspaper hound, takes a bet that he cannot commit burglary. He finds breaking and entering easy enough, but then discovers that he has forced his way into the home of a tough New York policeman. Naturally, Captain McEachern has a beautiful daughter and problems of his own. The complications which ensue from their meeting, involving a rich cast of Wodehousean characters from both sides of the Atlantic, create one of his most amusing and light-hearted early novels.

A Gentleman Of Leisure

Take a pig, a fat-headed earl, a country house, several pairs of frustrated lovers, some scheming outsiders, and all sorts of people who aren’t who they say they are. Mix thoroughly and apply the Wodehouse magic. The result is the lightest of literary soufflées, another instalment in the long-running saga of the Threepwood family, including the head of the clan, Lord Emsworth, his virago sister, Lady Constance, and his debonair brother, the Honourable Galahad Threepwood, ex-boulevardier and solver of romantic problems.

Blandings Castle

Who but P.G. Wodehouse could have extraced high comedy from the most noble and ancient game of golf? And who else could have combined this comedy with a real appreciation of the game, drawn from personal experience? Wodehouse's brilliant but humane brand of humour is perfectly suited to these stories of love, rivalry, revenge and fulfilment on the links. While the oldest member sits inside the clubhouse quoting Marcus Aurelius on patience and wisdom, outside on the green the strongest human passions burn. All human life is here, from Sandy McHoots, the cocky professional, to shy Ramsden Waters, whose only consolation in life is golf. Even golf-haters will not be able to resist stories which perfectly combine physical farce and verbal wit with a gallery of unforgettable characters.

The Clicking Of Cuthbert

A Hollywood star and an English aristocrat exchange souls while under ether at the dentist and the result is mayhem. Though his golden curls and sweet expression make him the idol of mothers throughout America, Joey Cooley is a tough nut who wants nothing more than to revenge himself on the agents, directors and producers who make his life a misery, before escaping back to Ohio. When his soul is transplanted into the body of an English earl with a boxing Blue he has the chance to 'poke them all in the snoot'. Lord Havershot, meanwhile, finds himself under the thumb of the fierce Miss Brinkmeyer and terrorized by the boy stars Joey has supplanted. The result is Anglo-American farce with the lightest of touches.

Laughing Gas

This volume reprints two of Wodehouse’s earliest books which take the form of story sequences linked by a central character, a technique he used many times thereafter. Delightful in themselves, they are interesting chiefly as windows on a great writer’s early evolution. 
 
In The Man of Means, he looks forward to Bertie Wooster and Ukridge, but also back to his Victorian models, in a fantastic tale of the little man struggling with fate. When a humble clerk comes into a fortune, he embarks on a series of misadventures which suggest that wealth is not necessarily an unmixed blessing. Here we see signs of the satirical writer Wodehouse might have become, and the spirit of Chaplin is not far away.

Kid Brady Stories & A Man of Means

"Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation.” 
 
Clarence Chugwater is not a Boy Scout for nothing. It is summer 1909 and everyone is too interested in the Test Match to notice that England has been invaded by the Germans. And the Russians. And the Chinese. Not to mention a ‘boisterous band of the Young Turks’, a mad Mullah, and a brace of North African pirates. The government has recently abolished the army so there is nothing to be done about it anyway, except give a masterly display of polite indifference. But this would be to reckon without patriotic Clarence, ‘Boy of Destiny’, who alone is prepared to stand up to the foe, and who devises a highly unorthodox plan to restore his country to freedom… 
 
The Swoop! Or, How Clarence Saved England reprints the 33 black and white drawings by C. Harrison that accompanied the first edition. It is supplemented by The Military Invasion of America, in which Clarence’s story is humorously transplanted across the Atlantic.

The Swoop! & The Military Invasion of America

The thought of being cooped up in Blandings Castle with Clarence, the Earl of Emsworth, the perennially youthful Galahad and with the Earl's younger son, Freddie Threepwood, openly appalled Colonel Wedge. It was, he grimly asserted, like being wrecked on a desert island with the Marx Brothers. But the arrival of Tipton Plimsoll at Blandings Castle considerably brightened the Colonel's horizon. For Tip-ton was a rich young American and rich young Americans were, in the Colonel's opinion, quite the most desirable companions for his daughter, Veronica, the dumbest beauty listed in the pages of Debrett. The stage was set for a great romance, or so the Colonel thought, and so it might have been had the knowledge of Freddie's erstwhile engagement to Veronica been withheld from the jealous Tipton, or if Prudence, the Earl's niece, had not been forcibly parted from her unsuitable lover, Bill Lister. On such incidents do great issues depend. However, Uncle Gaily, who combined the ready resource of a confidence trickster with the zeal of a cheerful crusader, intervened with an ingenious scheme to reunite the young lovers. It was a master-plan. How the plot miscarried at the crucial stage and in doing so caused a social and domestic revolution unparalleled in the history of Blandings Castle, is revealed in this most hilarious of chronicles.

Full Moon

The vintage plot concerns a Gainsborough miniature, a mouldering country house, an overweight solicitor, a fortune-hunter, a butler who isn't a butler, an American corporate lawyer and his kleptomaniac sister; but the heart of the story - in every sense - concerns Jerry West and his determined pursuit of air hostess Jane Hunnicutt, the eponymous Girl in Blue. When Jane unexpectedly becomes a millionairess, Jerry despairs of wooing her, but the sun never goes behind a cloud for long in Wodehouse: Jerry gets his Jane in the end, but only after a series of trials which raise the comic stakes to the author's highest level.

The Girl in Blue

It all starts with an umbrella, the best to be found in the Drones Club. From such an innocent beginning Wodehouse weaves a comic tale of suspense and romance involving one of his most distinctive early heroes, Ronald Eustace Psmith, monocled wit and devil-may-care boulevardier. Unusually for Wodehouse, this is not only a light comedy but also an adventure story in which crime and even gun-play drive the plot.

Leave It To Psmith

Bertie Wooster looks pretty stylish in his new Tyrolean hat - or so he thinks: others, notably Jeeves, disagree. But when Bertie embarks on an errand of mercy to Totleigh Towers, things get quickly out of control and he's going to need all the help Jeeves can provide. There are good eggs present, such as Gussie Fink-Nottle and the Rev. 'Stinker' Pinker. But there also is Sir Watkyn Bassett J.P., enemy of all the Woosters hold dear, to say nothing of his daughter Madeline and Roderick Spode, now raised to the peerage. And Major Brabazon Plank, the peppery explorer, who wants to lay Bertie out cold.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Very Good Jeeves! (1930) is a collection of eleven short stories starring Bertie Wooster in eleven alarming predicaments from which he has to be rescued by his peerless gentleman's gentleman. Whether Bertie is tangling with a red-headed ball of fire such as Roberta Wickham, dealing with an irate headmistress, placating a rampaging aunt, puncturing the wrong hot water bottle, singing 'Sonny Boy', or simply trying to concentrate on his golf handicap, Jeeves is always there to help - though rarely in ways which his employer expects. These brilliantly plotted stories give the essence of Wodehousian comedy.

Very Good, Jeeves!

LORD BISKERTON, son and heir of the sixth Earl of Hoddesdon, and known to his friends as Biscuit, had red hair, a preliminary scenario for a moustache and a noble determination to escape the disgrace of work. His friend Berry Conway, however, had succumbed to economic pressure and become the secretary to T. Paterson Frisby, a dyspeptic American who had twenty million and loved every cent of it. When Biscuit and Berry pooled ideas for their mutual betterment, and one idea concerned Ann Moon, Frisby's beautiful niece and heiress, they had to lean heavily on Aunt Vera, an old campaigner in the field of love. How Uncle Paterson was caught short and rushed to cover, while Aunt Vera hedged the market with a double play and salted down two money-making engagements for the House of Hoddesdon, is one of the most irresistible tales of the one and only P. G.

Big Money

Typical. Just when Bertie thinks that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, things start to go wrong again... 
There's young Bingo Little, who's in love for the umpteenth time and needs Bertie to put in a good word for him with his uncle; Aunt Agatha, who forces Bertie to get engaged to the formidable Honoria Glossop; and the troublesome twins, Claude and Eustace, whose antics when let loose in London know no bounds. 
Add to that some friction in the Wooster home over a red cummerbund, purple socks and some snazzy old Etonian spats, and poor Bertie's really in the soup... 
Only one man can save the day - the inimitable Jeeves. 
 
Characters Bertie Wooster - Narrator who went to school with Bingo. Won a prize at his first school for the best collection of wild flowers. 
Jeeves - Bertie's valet who has an aunt who loves the romantic novels of Rosie M. Banks 
Bingo Little - Mortimer's nephew who loves Mabel. Tells his uncle that Bertie is really Rosie M. Banks. 
Mabel - Waitress in a tea shop 
Mortimer Little - Retired fat businessman who owned Little's Liniment - "It Limbers Up the Legs." He is a gourmet. 
Jane Watson - Mortimer's cook engaged to Jeeves, but not for long

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