Random House UK gets Wodehouse backlist

Random House, Rogers Coleridge & White and the Trustees of the Wodehouse Estate today announced that Arrow Books will publish 43 P.G. Wodehouse titles in paperback when the Penguin licenses expire in 2008. The books will be published in new editions within the space of a single year as part of a major campaign designed to revitalize the sales of one of the world’s greatest writers of humor. The new paperback editions will join the existing trade paperback omnibuses of selected Wodehouse titles published by Hutchinson and will be represented by the same sales team as the uniform hardback editions published by Everyman.

Anthony Whittome, Editorial Director at Hutchinson said in a press release issued late yesterday: “Ever since we acquired rights in P.G. Wodehouse we have wanted to publish his major titles in Arrow and it is a huge vote of confidence in the strength of our mass-market division that the time has now arrived. The energy, imagination and professionalism of the Arrow team will further increase sales of an author who since the time of Hilaire Belloc has been universally acclaimed as the master of humorous writing, and will introduce him to a completely new range of readers.”

In a separate but simultaneous deal Hutchinson and Arrow have contracted an authoritative new volume of the Selected Letters of P.G. Wodehouse edited by Sophie Ratcliffe for publication in 2009.

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