Mr. Mulliner Speaking

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company. Good. 1930. First American Edition. Hardcover. (lacking the original dust jacket, but encased in a professionally-made facsimile reproduction of same; see 2nd image posted with this listing) [a good sound copy with modest wear to the extremities, some dampstaining to covers at upper tips that also affects the endpapers a little and the top edge of the text block, but none of the text; also a very faint dampstain surrounding the base of the spine, with no internal effect]. The author's second collection of "Mr. Mulliner" stories, published in the U.S. in February 1930, just a few months before Wodehouse arrived in Hollywood for his first and only foray in the movie capital. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had prevailed in a ferocious bidding war with several other studios, finally securing the writer's services under a six-month contract for a cool $2500 a week. In the early years of the talkies, of course, Hollywood was casting its net far and wide for writers of every stripe, to supply the words that their previously-mute talent now had to speak into the newfangled microphones -- but even amongst the veritable stampede of playwrights, novelists, and pulp fiction hacks flowing into L.A. at the time, Wodehouse was a significant "get." In his late 40s, he was at the top of his form, and his immensely popular novels and stories had made him a very big deal on both sides of the Atlantic. He was no stranger to the United States, either, having paid his first visit to our shores in 1904 and subsequently crossing the Pond on a pretty regular basis; he often remained for extended periods (he was stuck in New York for the entirety of the First World War, for instance), and from the mid-1910s throughout the 1920s, he collaborated on numerous musical comedies produced both on Broadway and in London's West End, while continuing to crank out a steady flow of novels and stories. Residentially, however, he hadn't ventured beyond New York until M-G-M came calling. Alas, for all the hype (and investment) related to his arrival in Tinseltown, during his relatively short stint at M-G-M (about a year) Wodehouse achieved only two not-very-impressive screen credits. Despite this lackluster output, he reportedly rather enjoyed himself, and even mined the experience for some story material: the group of five Mr. Mulliner stories that formed a part of his 1935 book "Blandings Castle and Elsewhere," was entitled "The Mulliners of Hollywood." NOTE again that this book bears a FACSIMILE dust jacket, to serve the dual purpose of protecting the book from further wear and enhancing its appearance on the shelf; its presence has not been factored in to our pricing. .