8vo. Color frontispiece and plates. Original black cloth, stamped and decorated in green and yellow, lettered in gilt, round color portrait laid down to upper cover; ORIGINAL DUST JACKET (spine ends and fore-corners chipped, small paper repair on verso, some edgewear). Provenance: Presumably John "Stapo" Stapleton, playwright and collaborator in the adaptation of Wodehouse's 1910 novel A Gentleman of Leisure (presentation inscription from the author).

FIRST EDITION, preceding the English edition, A Gentleman of Leisure, by six months. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY WODEHOUSE ("RECKLESS PELHAM") TO "STAPO THE SQUAB": "To Stapo the Squab, from Reckless Pelham, The Boy Rounder of Seventh Avenue, May 15 1910." Below the inscription, Wodehouse penned a presumably unpublished poem while in Vermont [see his first footnote on the pastedown]: "She don't give a darn for staying on the farm. Writes home sayin! She's doin' mighty well, But is seems kind of funny, that she's always wanting money, and ma says 'The girl's up to some kind o' Hell!' [...] I must be gettin' on [...] Lusitania, it looks like as if the comet was comin!" Wodehouse includes a second footnote next to the on the opposite page in reference to "Hell": "And quite true, too. Racketting all around them opry-houses with that there skate chickens." RARE IN ORIGINAL DUST JACKET. McIlvaine A13a.