Full Moon / Pigs Have Wings

 My first pic is a bit distressing, but it does illustrate something I have mentioned before - the fragile nature of some Penguins of the 1970s and 1980s....

This is my "Ionicus" edition of Full Moon, printed in 1979. The gum used in the spine is brittle, and, as so often, the spine snapped in the process of reading, detaching whole chunks of pages. This used to happen regularly, no matter how careful you were. Oddly enough, this tragedy occurred with some titles and not others; it was as if quite different binding processes and materials were used on different books.

As the above copy is clearly not readable, I ordered a cheap copy from ebay as a substitute. This is what arrived:

I think these editions date from about the year 2000 or slightly before. I will not say much about this cover, except that it is not to my taste. It would have done as a reading copy, were it not for the type inside, which seems to me ugly - not even fully justified. There is a grim humour in the fact that the type is called Monotype Trump:

I thought I might be able to read this at a pinch, but it took me only a few lines to realise I simply couldn't; the shot was not on the board. I therefore ordered yet another copy, this one printed in 1961 with a rather jolly cover by Geoffrey Salter:

The interior type is the same as the Ionicus edition, and therefore perfect. 

But all this is beside the point. We are here to talk about Ionicus, and so we shall. This is his cover design for Full Moon, dating, I think, from 1975:

It is a mid-range Ionicus, not one of his best but far from his worst. Freddie Threepwood examines the artistic work of his friend Bill Lister and is not convinced. They are in Bill's room at the Emsworth Arms, which provides accommodation of a sturdy but not opulent nature to the passing wayfarer. The effect is rather static (unlike Geoffrey Salter's effort, for instance), but what of it? Bill is just passing through, and his shirtings are strewn negligently hither and thither.

Here is the first paragraph of this edition in good old sturdy Monotype Garamond:

I have little to say about the passage itself except to marvel at the smoothness and economy of the storytelling. Full Moon was written by Wodehouse during the Second World War, after being discharged from a German internment camp, and was published in the UK in 1947. I have recently been rereading a lot of Wodehouse's wartime oeuvre (five full novels), and while I enjoyed Full Moon I found it a little weaker than the others. It shares a whole subplot (about a mixup of jewellery to be given to a young woman for her birthday) with Joy in the Morning, which Wodehouse had finished writing immediately previous to working on Full Moon. We are familiar, of course, with his tendency to reuse ideas, but this feels like a little too much.

In my opinion, Pigs Have Wings (1952) is a much better book altogether. It is as if Wodehouse sat down and said to himself, "What is the farthest extreme I can reach with the idea of kidnapping a pig?" It ends at an extreme of delirious nuttiness which one can only stand back and admire.

Here's Ionicus's cover, which I also love:

The scene is Beach the butler's pantry, and it is pleasing to see that whatever other social changes may pass by Blandings Castle, it has at least kept its telephone technology up to a post-war date. Beach, in the process of pouring out his special port for the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, is frozen in horror as Gally propounds a shocking proposal and his niece Prudence Garland looks on, doubtful.

Here's the first few paragraphs, in Monotype Baskerville (Baskerville is far preferable to Trump):

Sometimes, especially later on, Wodehouse seemed to mislay the point of the Blandings novels, and the plot mechanisms had a feel of going through the motions. Not here, though. In my opinion, Pigs Have Wings is the last of the top-class Blandings novels.