Psmith in the City

I've put Ionicus's cover right at the top of this entry for one very good reason: it's absolutely gorgeous. Those dark greens and browns (the Wodehouse logo just the right shade of green to match); the two main figures (foppish Psmith on the left; his friend the straight-down-the-line Mike Jackson on the right) in very characteristic attitudes; the as-ever perfectly captured décor so exactly right that one can almost smell the ink. The title first appeared in Penguin in 1970, so it appears to be one of Ionicus's very first Wodehouse designs.

Psmith (the P is silent, "cp. the name Zbysco, in which the Z is given a similar miss-in-baulk", as Psmith helpfully explains in Mike) really shouldn't work as a character. When I think of him in the abstract, he is a kind of exemplar of privilege: deliberately affected in speech and vocabulary, insouciant, condescending, perpetually treating the world as if it were some childish game put on for his personal entertainment. Dash it all, the man even went to Eton!

But in practice the character is, I find, irresistible. His manner has been cultivated to cause the maximum of irritation to those nominally above  him - when we first meet him in Mike (1909) that means schoolmasters; and here, in Mike's sequel Psmith in the City (1910) it means his employers in that renowned establishment the New Asiatic Bank. As Wodehouse himself had been employed as a clerk at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank from 1900 to 1902, we don't have to go far to see where he found his material for this funny and perceptive but in parts even slightly bitter novel. It feels, on the whole, like Wodehouse's revenge on his former employers, an account of his experiences, transmuted by the addition of the one character who could be counted on to give better than he got in any situation.

The novel's supposed hero is Mike Jackson, the real Wodehouse substitute, a brilliant cricketer but otherwise honourable, slightly slow-witted and even a little humourless. It is taken for granted that working in a bank is the last thing any self-respecting soul would want to do. Escape is the goal, and in Mike's case the alternative is cricket as a profession. Almost any means is permissible: tricking, cheating, lying, and generally running rings round the stolid respectable managers who stand in our heroes' way. In these days it all seems rather daringly subversive.

The text is set in Intertype Times. Less flamboyant than, say, Monotype Garamond, its restraint somehow seems to fit with the repressive atmosphere of the book's locale:

Ionicus's covers for the Psmith novels are consistently good: atmospheric, elegant, and with a real care for artistic effect unfortunately lacking in a handful of other covers. I have the impression that Ionicus had an especial liking for Psmith; it's a great pity that he never did Mike and Psmith (the second half of Mike) which appeared in Penguin a few years later with a truly dreadful cover by another artist.

As I also have a later (1984) reprint of Psmith in the City, still with the Ionicus picture but using the revised cover design, I include this below. I very strongly hold that the later design is inferior: not as well balanced in the placement of author and title, clunky in typography, and with the picture placed just a little bit too high. Well, never mind. I can see that this title is one of the rare ones that has escaped the ghastly designs of the Millennium Penguin editions and the current Arrow versions. Let us be grateful therefore for small mercies.