The estimable Terry Teachout, the world’s most prolific man, offers a fascinating throwaway fact on his <a href=

http://www.terryteachout.com/archives20050821.shtml#102245

>blog — that P.G. Wodehouse’s first Jeeves novel was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1932. Cosmo paid $50,000. In present day bucks, that’s more than $600,000. Six hundred thousand dollars. For a delightful comic novel about a butler and a moron. Today you’d have to be a porn star writing about your affair with Bill Clinton to get that kind of money for serial rights from a a magazine.