In the Original box. Blue cloth binding with gilt title on the spine. Brown river boating image on the front board.

F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feel and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

• When three men, whose ideal is idleness and whose capacity for organization is negligible, decide on a punting holiday on the Thames – and add to their number a dog who thinks little of the whole idea and favours a firmer footing for his native pugnacity – the resultant chaos is easily imagined. Jerome K Jerome’s inconsequential, digressive and often hilarious account of just such a holiday is one of the all time classics of light fiction.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty.

The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator Jerome K. Jerome) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, “as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog”. The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff.

Following the overwhelming success of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome later published a sequel, about a cycling tour in Germany, titled Three Men on the Bummel (also known as Three Men on Wheels, 1900).

A comic masterpiece that has never been out of print since it was first published in 1889, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat includes an introduction and notes by Jeremy Lewis in Penguin Classics.

In his introduction, Jeremy Lewis examines Jerome K. Jerome’s life and times, and the changing world of Victorian England he depicts – from the rise of a new mass-culture of tabloids and bestselling novels to crazes for day tripping and bicycling.

Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humourist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels. Jerome was born in Walsall, England, and, although he was able to attend grammar school, his family suffered from poverty at times, as did he as a young man trying to earn a living in various occupations. In his twenties, he was able to publish some work, and success followed. He married in 1888, and the honeymoon was spent on a boat on the Thames; he published Three Men in a Boat soon afterwards. He continued to write fiction, non-fiction and plays over the next few decades, though never with the same level of success. He died in 1927 and his body was cremated.