In a darkening world, Everyman Library is an abiding light. Since 1906 Everyman has been producing classic texts in stylish, enduring and inexpensive editions. With its takeover and revamping in 1990 by David Campbell Publishers, the house took on new life, with a complete overhaul of design, so that by now the Everyman Library has become a repository of many of the greatest works of international literature.
The latest Everyman venture is The Everyman Wodehouse, a series which, we are promised, "will eventually contain all the novels and stories, edited and reset". This is quite a pledge, given that old Plum in his long lifetime - he died in 1975 at the age of 93 - published more than 90 books. Can there be anyone alive who does not know Wodehouse, if not through his books, then from television and radio adaptations of the Wooster/Jeeves stories? Others still may know him unknowingly, for after he had settled in America in 1909 he wrote lyrics for some of the great song writers, including Jerome Kern.
Wodehouse is a master of English prose style. His comic vision is wonderful, but it would be nothing without his gift for the nuances of English English - as distinct, that is, from Hiberno-English, say, or Amero-English. Opening a novel of his at any page, one is struck immediately by the cut-glass sparkle and edge of his prose. Here, from Pigs Have Wings (1952), is the swineophile Lord Emsworth's brother Galahad recounting to Maudie Stubbs the story of "Clarence and the Arkwright wedding":
"The Arkwrights lived out Bridgnorth way, and their daughter Amelia was getting married, so Clarence [Lord Emsworth, that is] tied a knot in his handkerchief to remind him to send the bride's mother a telegram on the happy day."
"And he forgot?"
"Oh, no, he sent it. `My heartfelt congratulations to you on this joyous occasion,' he said."
"Well, wasn't that all right?"
"It was fine. Couldn't have been improved on. Only the trouble was that in one of his distrait moments he sent it, not to Mrs Arkwright but to another friend of his, a Mrs Cartwright, and her husband had happened to die that morning. Diabetes. Very sad. We were all very sorry about it, but no doubt the telegram cheered her up. Did I ever tell you about Clarence and the salad?"
This is comedy at its most sublime, and the sublimity is in the details - "Diabetes. Very sad" - and the masterly fashion in which they are set out.
So far this year, four titles have been published in The Everyman Wodehouse - The Code of the Woosters, Right Ho, Jeeves, Ukridge and Pigs have Wings - with five more to come. Apart from their glorious content, these are superb books, flawlessly designed and printed (in Germany), with good cloth covers and sewn bindings, and splendidly apt jacket illustrations by Andrzej Klimowski. They are also astonishingly good value at £9.99 sterling each (though how this translates into IR£13 surely requires an explanation). Old Wodehouse hands will seize on this edition with delight, while new readers will be encountering in the best possible setting the work of a master craftsman, of whom Evelyn Waugh observed: "He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times. His new novel, Eclipse, is published this month by Picador