$700
Estimate: $2,500 - $3,500
P.G. Wodehouse Collection of William Toplis
Auction: May 7, 2020 11:00:00 AM EDT
New York: Author’s Associates, no date (but ca. 1951). Play script. 140 onion skin leaves ([3], 65, [1], 71), printed on rectos only. Previous bookseller’s laid in description notes, “This was Wodehouse’s own copy, gifted by him to his biographer David A. Jasen.” In Jasen’s 1974 biography he lists this play as Phipps (Kilroy Was Here), notes the date of 1951, and that it was never produced. Roderick Easdale, in The Novel Life of PG Wodehouse (2004), wrote “…the script of…Joy in the Morning…was originally called Phipps and is the play from which [the novel] The Old Reliable was written, and has no connection with the…novel of the same name…” Easdale also points out that the play (Joy in the Morning, née Phipps) was indeed put on, in 1954, by The Buckfast Players at their Studio Theatre in Ashburton in Devon. On the penultimate page a line has been drawn in blue biro under Phipps’ final line, “Yes, madam”, and is followed by the word “End”, both in an unknown hand but presumably Wodehouse’s. Bound in stiff tan wrappers with pasted on printer’s label with title and authors listed. Also, the number “2” is typed on the top far right corner of the front wrapper, perhaps denoting which number of the printed scripts this copy is? Text further bound in limp ecru wrappers, the whole held together with three brass tabs. In a black cloth-covered fall-down-back box.