Chapter 12 ‘Very nearly magical’: books and their readers in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series

Powerful books

In the Discworld, books are powerful. This is especially true of the books that are gathered together in the library of the Unseen University, the largest collection of books within the Discworld. As Jim Shanahan summarises: ‘Books are knowledge, and knowledge is power; power is energy, and energy is mass; and mass distorts time and space.’⁹ The power of books to manipulate the fabric of reality is an acknowledged fact in the Discworld. The result of this warped space and time is L-space, a quantum space wherein all books and all collections of books are connected. In The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen and Pratchett explain that:

It is via L-space that all books are connected (quoting the ones before them, and influencing the ones that come after). But there is no time in L-space. Nor is there, strictly speaking, any space. Nevertheless, L-space is infinitely large and connects all libraries, everywhere and everywhen. It’s never further than the other side of the bookshelf, yet only the most senior and respected librarians know the way in.¹⁰

Through L-space the Library in the Unseen University becomes infinite. Because it is connected to every other collection of books in the universe, the power and reach of its collection is multiplied and magnified exponentially.

Because of the potential power of the collections, many of the books in the Unseen University Library are, quite sensibly, kept out of reach of readers. In describing the fittings and function of the Library, Pratchett draws on images of the chained library, common enough in academic and religious institutions in England between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, when books were highly valued. As Richard Gameson notes, the chains used to lock books to medieval lecterns were not intended to impede reading, but to ‘ensure that they were not removed’.¹¹ In his survey of chained libraries, which seems a likely source for Pratchett’s Library, Burnett Hillman Streeter explains wryly:

In the Middle Ages books were rare, and so was honesty. A book, it was said, was worth as much as a farm; unlike a farm it was portable property that could easily be purloined. Valuables in all ages require protection. Books, therefore, were kept under lock and key. This was done in two ways. Either they were shut up in a cupboard … or a chest, or they were chained, sometimes four or five together to a desk, often in the choir.¹²

However, the practice of chaining books in the Unseen University Library seems deliberately calculated to impede and even prevent reading. This is because the books in this particular library are not just valuable commodities, but potentially dangerous ones too. Pratchett writes: ‘All books of magic have a life of their own. Some of the really energetic ones can’t simply be chained to the bookshelves; they have to be nailed shut or kept between steel plates.’¹³ These precautions are not merely to protect the books from the readers, but also to protect the readers from the books. In The Light Fantastic (1986), the librarian, Dr Horace Worblehat, is transformed into an orangutan simply because the Octavo, a sentient book that contains the Eight Great Spells that were used in the creation of the Discworld, has been opened.¹⁴ In Guards! Guards! (1989) a book purloined from the University Library gives its readers the power to summon dragons from another dimension, though, significantly, it does not confer on them the power to control these dragons. Even the apparently ordinary books in the University Library are potentially dangerous. As Pratchett explains in Soul Music (1994): ‘It would be a mistake to think that [mundane books] weren’t also dangerous, just because reading them didn’t make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader’s brain.’¹⁵

It is unsurprising, therefore, that in spite of widespread literacy many characters in Discworld regard reading and printed books with distrust and even distaste. The Nac Mac Feegle, a race of enthusiastically violent pixies, are deeply superstitious about the written word, believing that once a person’s name is written down, the person can be sent to prison. They fear that learning to read irreparably alters the way a person’s mind works. Big Yan explains that:

When a man starts messin’ wi’ the readin’ and the writin’ then he’ll come doon with a dose o’ the thinkin’ soon enough. I’ll fetch some o’ the lads and we’ll hold his heid under water until he stops doin’ it, ’tis the only cure. It can kill a man, the thinkin’.¹⁶

For the Feegles, thinking is a disease transmitted through the written word and one that, left untreated, will prove fatal. Although the Feegles’ beliefs about reading being fatal are not widespread, relatively few characters in the Discworld are described as avid, or even basically competent, readers. Among human characters, although literacy is widespread, reading is not widely celebrated. Glenda Sugarbean, a young woman with a keen interest in romance novels, ‘read the way a cat eats: furtively, daring anyone to notice’,¹⁷ suggesting that even for a fluent reader like herself, there is something shameful in the act of reading. Fred Colon, a member of the City Watch, who is described as ‘functionally literate’, thinks ‘of reading and writing like he thought about boots – you needed them, but they weren’t supposed to be fun, and you got suspicious about people who got a kick out of them’.¹⁸

While the suspicion of reading is pervasive in the Discworld series, the root cause of this unease is not often expressed. It is only in Monstrous Regiment (2003) that Sergeant Jackrum is able to articulate the discomfort that he and many others feel when confronted with the written word. He complains that: ‘You can’t trust the people who do that stuff [reading and writing]. They mess around with the world, and it turns out everything you know is wrong.’¹⁹ Here it is not clear whether Jackrum means ‘readers’ or ‘books’ when he says ‘they mess around with the world’, but in a sense it does not really matter what he means, because for Jackrum as for many other Discworld characters, readers and books are synonymous. That readers, like books, can ‘mess around with the world’ implies that there is some power contained within books that, in turn, rubs off onto their readers. William de Worde, one of the most ably literate characters in the series, recognises that the power of books is rooted in the shifting and movable nature of type. As he gazes at a typesetter’s tray, he realises that the metal blocks that make up words – and make up whole texts – have the potential to become anything at all:

William stared down at the box of letters again. Of course, a quill pen potentially contained anything you wrote with it. He could understand that. But it did so in a clearly theoretical way, a safe way. Whereas these dull gray blocks looked threatening. He could understand why they worried people. Put us together in the right way, they seemed to say, and we can be anything you want. We could even be something you don’t want. We can spell anything. We can certainly spell trouble.²⁰

Here Pratchett reminds the reader that the power of the printed word comes from possibility. Books are not immutable or permanent, but are composed of moving parts. The astute reader, aware that books are born from movable type and are inherently flexible, should be open to the possibilities of various, varied and variable readings.

The mutable nature of books is highlighted throughout the Discworld series. Pratchett demonstrates that even supposedly holy books are flawed and open to interpretation and misinterpretation. The best expression of this is the Book of Nuggan, the holy book of the Nugganites who follow the small god Nuggan. The Abominations lists at least 6,668 things that Nuggan has prohibited, including chocolate, false teeth, umbrellas, mechanical devices for measuring time, girls knowing how to write, shirts with six buttons, babies and the colour blue.²¹ As the list of abominations is continually updated by Nuggan, a god who grows increasingly deranged, his followers keep their holy book in loose-leaf binders so that new abominations can be added and old ones can be removed.²² That the holy book is open to change renders it unstable, implying that Nuggan himself is unstable, and that the whole religion founded around him can be called into question. While power might seem to rest with the godhead and his priests, Pratchett allows the reader and some key characters to understand that power does not really stem from the god’s words, but from the faith that his believers place – or rather misplace – in him. In Carpe Jugulum (1998) the realisation that faith in holy books is misplaced even dawns on the Quite Reverend Mightily Oats, a devout Omnian priest. When he is desperate to kindle a fire that will drive away the darkness and the wet and the threat of vampires, he initially turns to the Book of Om for comfort and guidance, and despairs when he cannot read the book by the feeble light of his matches. It is only when he ‘listened to his own mind’²³ that he realises that the Book of Om will help him build the fire he needs: he just needs to set the whole book on fire first. Here Pratchett underscores the idea that no book in the Discworld is inherently holy or meaningful and that books are made to serve their readers.

The mighty text

If knowledge is power and books are knowledge, it should follow that because of the proliferation of books within the Discworld, power is everywhere and accessible to everyone, circulating through the entire population and open to all kinds of readers. Yet we must remember that different books hold different kinds of power. The magical force contained within the pages of the Octavo differs from the political and social power of the Ankh-Morpork Times. This is not only because one text is magical and the other mundane, but because one has the power of institutional authority and the other has the power of subversive potential. On the one hand, there are what we might term ‘authoritative texts’. These are produced by, or sanctioned by, those in possession of religious, educational or governmental power. The power wielded by these institutions is typically privileged, legitimate and patriarchal. This power comes from the top of the social ladder. The texts draw their power from established institutions and in turn bolster the power of these institutions. Other texts operate beyond these established sites of institutional authority and so their power rests in enabling otherwise disempowered characters to challenge the established world order.

That these mundane books can empower their audiences is especially important when we consider that books are often associated with people who are outside of the traditional models of power such as women, children and outcasts. Some of these unsanctioned texts, such as Nanny Ogg’s scandalous ‘cookbook’, The Joye of Snacks, are chaotic and playfully subversive. Others, like The Ankh-Morpork Times, the Discworld’s first newspaper, disrupt social order and speak truth to power. These texts draw their power from their potential to disrupt the orders imposed by institutions. They may not have authority but they do have might. Writing in relation to children’s literature, Clémentine Beauvais distinguishes between authority and might. She explains that:

Because the implied child reader of children’s literature might be taught by the children’s book something that the adult does not yet know, that child is powerful in some sense of the word power – a sense that I call ‘might’. The adult authority is not – or not just, and certainly not always – an omnipotent, manipulative, authoritarian, repressive, oppressive entity. Authoritative, yes – but not authoritarian.²⁴

Like the child readers Beauvais discusses, the mundane texts produced by characters within the Discworld novels possess a ‘potent, latent future to be filled with yet-unknown action’.²⁵ Their power rests in a sense of their mighty possibility: nobody knows what could happen to the readers of these texts, nobody is fully certain of the impact they could have on the world. This is especially true of a book called Where’s My Cow?, one of the few children’s books mentioned in Pratchett’s series.

Where’s My Cow? is, on the surface, an innocuous and simple picture book in which the narrator tries to find his lost cow. Its format and plot is familiar to any Roundworld reader who has ever read Fiona Watt’s ‘That’s Not My …’ series.²⁶ In his efforts to locate the cow, the narrator encounters and is momentarily bamboozled by various other familiar animals:

Eventually, the cow would be found. It was that much of a pageturner. Of course, some suspense was lent by the fact that all other animals were presented in some way that could have confused a kitten, who perhaps had been raised in a darkened room. The horse was standing in front of a hatstand, as they so often did, and the hippo was eating at a trough against which was an upturned pitchfork. Seen from the wrong direction, the tableau might look for just one second like a cow.²⁷

Although it seems to pale in comparison with the magical world-shaping force of a book like the Octavo, this children’s book has enormous subversive might. In Pratchett’s speech ‘Straight from the Heart, Via the Groin’, delivered in 2004, he mentions that Where’s My Cow? was the starting point around which the plot of Thud! revolved; that he was absolutely certain that: ‘there’s going to be a moment where Vimes is reading through it for the umpteenth time … and in the back of his mind is this terribly complex crime, and somehow that little book is going to become pivotal to the solution’.²⁸ Although it is a ‘little book’, Where’s My Cow? holds its own in a terribly complex world. It is a mighty text that can shape lives, thwart demons and make its readers into powerful and potentially dangerous people.

Clues, cows and karabasis

Samuel Vimes, the commander of the city watch, is, perhaps, the most dangerous reader in the Discworld. He appears as the central figure in the Watch sub-series of novels, Guards! Guards! (1989), Men at Arms (1993), Feet of Clay (1996), Jingo (1997), The Fifth Elephant (1999), Night Watch (2002), Thud! (2005) and Snuff (2011) and the very short story ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ (1993), and as a minor character in many other Discworld novels. Unlike many characters, Vimes shows no difficulty with reading or writing: as a child he had the honour of being a ‘blackboard monitor’²⁹ in his class, which suggests that he was favoured by his teacher, perhaps even favoured because of his academic promise, and, as an adult, makes his living reading – and reading into – all kinds of things. As a detective, Vimes is a kind of professional reader, ‘an authorial figure who strives to apprehend and contain the criminal plot and thus appropriate the entire story’³⁰ by interpreting the clues left at crime scenes and reconstructing the evidence into a sort of narrative. Although Vimes evidently dislikes reading the reports compiled by the watchmen under his command and loathes the Ankh-Morpork Times, he is an enthusiastic reader of other texts and one of the only fluent readers of the city space itself.

In Pratchett’s work, Ankh-Morpork functions as a vast figurative text intelligible only to a select few who have learned to interpret its moods and weathers and to navigate its mazy streets. Through his long experience as a watchman and because he has spent virtually his entire life within the bounds of Ankh-Morpork, Vimes is keenly attuned to the city and its moods. In addition to his encyclopaedic knowledge of the citizens – particularly those citizens who are inclined towards crime or misdemeanour – he has a deep and embodied knowledge of the city streets. A recurrent motif in the novels about Vimes is his preference for cheap, thin-soled boots, the kind worn by some of the poorest people in the city. These cheap boots let in water and cold, but they have the advantage of bringing the soles of his feet into almost direct contact with the ground, enabling him to know by the shape of the cobblestones where exactly in the city he is, even in the dark. In Night Watch, Vimes’s comprehensive knowledge of the city streets is displayed for the reader:

after a lifetime of walking them, he did feel the streets. There were the cobblestones: catheads, trollheads, loaves, short and long setts, rounders, Morpork Sixes, and the eighty-seven types of paving brick, and the fourteen types of stone slab, and the twelve types of stone never intended for street slabs but which had got used anyway and had their own patterns of wear, and the rubbles, and the gravels, and the repairs, and the thirteen different types of cellar covers, and twenty types of drain lids – He bounced a little, like a man testing the hardness of something. ‘Elm Street,’ he said. He bounced again. ‘Junction with Twinkle. Yeah.’³¹

Here Pratchett emphasises the embodied nature of this knowledge, calling attention to how these different surfaces feel beneath Vimes’s feet, to the action of bouncing on the balls of his feet, an action that allows Vimes to renew his contact with the ground and reawaken his senses. Through the thin soles of his boots, Vimes comes into contact with the city and knows it phenomenologically as well as intellectually. Significantly, in Feet of Clay his ability to navigate the city through touch is described as a kind of literacy, as an ability to ‘read the street’.³² By reading with his whole being, by being able to read texts that others cannot, Vimes is a character endowed with more than usual literacy.

Vimes’s ability to read all kinds of texts comes to the fore in Thud!, a narrative which involves the intersections between a variety of texts: mundane and mystical, personal and political. The plot revolves around Vimes’s efforts to solve the murder of Grag Hamcrusher, a fundamentalist dwarf who had riled up interracial tensions among the dwarfs and the trolls in the city through preaching hatred and violence. Vimes identifies Hamcrusher’s hatred as being founded in ‘some holy book, apparently’³³ and his dismissal of the dwarfs’ holy book – the Book of Tak – brings him momentarily closer to the other Discworld characters who are suspicious of any kind of text. But Carrot, who was raised by dwarf parents, reminds Vimes that dwarfs ‘think the world was written.… All words have enormous power. Destroying a book is worse than murder to a deep-downer.’³⁴ Carrot’s analogy links books to life, a connection that becomes crucial later in the novel. While the Book of Tak seems to be the root cause of all the trouble in the beginning of the novel, it is another kind of text made by dwarfs, a mine sign, that brings real danger into the city.

Mine signs are a sort of graffiti made by delving dwarfs. Most of these signs are innocuous; small glyphs scratched into the walls and supporting beams of a mine to show other dwarfs the way or to label the excavations. But other mine signs are mystical and extremely powerful. Carrot explains that: ‘Some deep-downers believe that the dark signs are real … Like they exist somewhere down in the dark under the world, and they cause themselves to be written.’³⁵ In the course of investigating Hamcrusher’s murder, Vimes accidentally brushes up against one of the mine signs and it leaps from the wall of the mine into his body. The sign Vimes touches is the Summoning Dark, a glyph ‘drawn in the dark … by a dying dwarf’³⁶ that brings with it the power of a demonic entity. The Summoning Dark possesses Vimes and though he is unaware of its presence, it manipulates him into leaving the city space and to travel to Koom Valley, the site of an ancient battle between dwarfs and trolls.

In counterbalance to the Summoning Dark and the religious texts of the dwarfs, Pratchett sets the picture book Where’s My Cow? This is an important book to Vimes because he reads it to his son, Young Sam, every single night at six o’clock. Vimes believes that reading a book with his son before bedtime is more important than anything else in the world. The danger, action and violence of Vimes’s professional life is thrown into sharp relief by his domestic family life through these moments of reading. Pratchett’s decision to give over significant amounts of narrative space to the scenes about reading Where’s My Cow? communicates the central importance of this nightly ritual to readers, establishing the profound connection Vimes has with his child and the deep importance of his commitment to read to his child every night. There is great tenderness and intimacy in Pratchett’s descriptions of the bedtime routine.

Young Sam pulled himself up against the cot’s rails, and said, ‘Da!’ The world went soft.… It was funny, really. He spent the day yelling and shouting and talking and bellowing … but here, in this quiet time … he never knew what to say. He was tongue-tied in the presence of a fourteen-month-old baby. All the things he thought of saying, like ‘Who’s Daddy’s little boy, then?’ sounded horribly false, as though he’d got them from a book. There was nothing to say, nor, in this soft pastel room, anything that needed to be said.³⁷

There is a palpable sense of their closeness here, and in the contrast between the soft, safe world of the nursery and the cruelty and violence of the world outside the door. It is interesting to note that Vimes feels that any trite or clumsy words sound like words ‘from a book’ which suggests that he, too, has internalised some of the dislike of the written word that is so pervasive in the Discworld. In spite of this slight unease about books, Vimes makes Where’s My Cow? a core element of his son’s bedtime routine and, by extension, a core element of his parenting. Thus, the book and the nightly ritual of reading the book to his child becomes an anchor-point for Vimes’s identity. He reflects: ‘I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Hell, I’m probably a spoon. Well, I’m going to be Vimes, and Vimes reads Where’s My Cow? to Young Sam at six o’clock. With the noises done right.’³⁸ Through reading to his son, Vimes forges a new parental identity that is founded on duty, honesty and tenderness.

Through shared reading, Vimes encultures in Young Sam the kinds of power that reading has brought to him. In one key scene he demonstrates the flexibility of texts, supplementing the usual plot of the picture book for one in which the narrator looks for his daddy in the streets of Ankh-Morpork and meets a disreputable assortment of city dwellers, beggars and thieves. While Vimes reverts to the official version of the story the next day, this playful reworking of the text demonstrates to Young Sam that stories can be changed: that readers have the power to resist the force of narrativium and to create their own narratives. Vimes shows his son that while books are important, their potency is derived from the power the reader invests in them. In showing Young Sam an alternative version of his favourite story, Vimes shows his son that texts can be resisted and played with and brought to heel rather than slavishly obeyed. It is especially significant that he uses a picture book meant for child readers in order to do this. Children’s books, and particularly picture books, are not simple texts with which to train novice readers, but dynamic texts that demand playful and nimble reading.³⁹ As Beauvais explains:

sophisticated picture books, or iconotexts (Hallberg 1982), are characterised by a gap between pictures and text; between words and images. Gaps … encourage creativity in the young reader, leading the child to ‘fill them in’ with their own interpretation, since no clear meaning is given in either text or picture.⁴⁰

The way the verbal and visual narratives may run in parallel or at cross-purposes, and may complement or contradict the meanings on offer, forces picture book readers to engage in multiple, complex interpretive acts from the very outset. As a picture book, Where’s My Cow? is the perfect kind of book to demonstrate the mutability of text and to show Young Sam that no book is complete without a reader.

Of course, the flexibility of texts does not mean they cannot become sacred, and Where’s My Cow? certainly becomes a sacred text within Thud! Because he reads the same book every night, Vimes has committed it to memory and can recite it in its entirety: ‘He recited it tonight, while wind rattled the windows and this little nursery world, with its pink and blue peace, its creatures who were so very soft and woolly and fluffy, seemed to enfold them both. On the nursery clock, a little woolly lamb rocked the seconds away.’⁴¹ The act of recitation is significant. This conscious recurrence, wherein the words of the text are repeated faithfully, imbues the book with a ceremonial quality. In this moment of reading, Vimes slips outside of the ordinary, profane time of the outside world – hinted at through the woolly lamb marking the passage of time – and enters into a space where time seems to stand still. The nursery becomes both a space and a time outside of the ordinary business of the world. Here Vimes and his son enter into a kind of mythic time that revolves around repetition, recurrence and renewal. Through daily repetition, through the ritual of shared reading, Where’s My Cow? becomes a sacred text for Vimes and his son. The words of the book are enmeshed with ‘the deeply ingrained, almost magical, habit of sanity and normal fatherhood’.⁴² This ‘almost magical’ habit of reading echoes the ‘almost magical’ quality of engraving and printing mentioned throughout Pratchett’s corpus. Where’s My Cow? is a magic book, though not a book of magic.

Pratchett allows the reader to see exactly how much the bedtime story means to Vimes and Young Sam and how crucial it is to their identities as parent and child when, later in Thud!, Vimes is prevented from getting home on time to read to Young Sam. Both father and son are deeply affected by the loss of their shared reading routine. The boy is devastated, left staring at the nursery door and wailing, no matter how many other people try to comfort him. Vimes, on the other hand, turns berserk. As he moves through the caves in Koom Valley, he bellows out the words of the bedtime story, learned by heart through endless repetition as he faces down and kills the people who have prevented him from getting home on time to read the story. This scene is fantastically strange, with both horror and humour rising out of the juxtaposition between the image of the mighty avenging hero and the ridiculousness of him screaming the words of Where’s My Cow? to the confusion and horror of everyone else in the cave system. The scene recalls katabatic narratives, ‘a journey of the Dead made by a living person in the flesh who returns to our world to tell the tale’:⁴³ here, too, is a voyage into the underworld and the realm of the dead whence the hero returns victorious. Thus, the words of Where’s My Cow? serve a mythic as well as mundane function: the words of the picture book bring Vimes back from the underworld – both a literal underworld of the cave system and a metaphorical one of death – and call him home to his son. It seems that Vimes is a man doubly possessed, once by the malevolent spirit of the Summoning Dark and once by the picture book Where’s My Cow?

In recalling the hero from the underworld, Where’s My Cow? becomes one of the most powerful texts in the Discworld. It enacts literal magic. The shared love Vimes and Young Sam have for the book make it an intensely meaningful one to them personally, and that Vimes has internalised and memorised the text means that it becomes part of him. Vimes’s endless oral repetition of this text recalls its status as a ritual text for father and son, and he repeats it, like a prayer or a mantra, at the point of death. Throughout Thud!, two books account for almost all of the thirty-nine instances of the word ‘book’ in the text: one of these is the Book of Tak, the other is Where’s My Cow? In balancing these two against one another – a holy book and a mundane one, a book of authority and a book of might – Pratchett suggests that these books are equal and complementary forces, held in perfect equilibrium. The choice of book is the thing that saves Vimes from doom: he does not believe in the spirit of the Summoning Dark, but he does believe in reading to his child at bedtime. The picture book, in this moment of extreme suffering and pain, is mightier than the holy book, and enables its devotee to rise from darkness and death to fulfil the promise of reading to Young Sam at bedtime. Its potency comes not from any godhead or authority, but from the shared faith Vimes and his son have in the book and from the ritual repetition of its words.

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld both magic and mundane books have power and pass that power on to their readers. Pratchett himself recognised the ‘might’ of stories, and in his Katharine Briggs Memorial Lecture explained that all stories present the possibility of futures and that, through listening or reading, an audience can participate in the power of a story: ‘those sitting in the circle of firelight while the story is told are not passive listeners, but believe they have some rights in the story and that the story itself is a window into another world with a quasi-existence of its own’.⁴⁴ The reader of a book is not ‘passive’ but active, and can be inspired to take further action. Crucially, Young Sam is not a passive listener to the bedtime story Where’s My Cow?, but an active participant in the story. He participates vocally, through coos and babble, and emotionally: he is invested in the shared reading time with his father, every bit as much as Vimes himself is invested. Young Sam loves reading and loves this book in particular with a fierce and enthusiastic love. It is his insistence on this story that recalls his father from the world of the dead, it is his joy in the picture book that makes it a mighty text, it is his participation as a child reader that enables Where’s My Cow? to enact the promise of the ‘very nearly magical’ power of the printed word, securing its place among the most powerful books in the Discworld.

Notes

1. 1.  Terry Pratchett, The Truth (London: Transworld, 2000), p. 26.

2. 2.  Terry Pratchett, The Science of Discworld (London: Ebury, 1999); Terry Pratchett, The Art of Discworld (London: HarperCollins, 2004); Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson, The Folklore of Discworld: Legends, Myths and Customs from the Discworld with Helpful Hints from Planet Earth (London: Doubleday, 2008).

3. 3.  ‘Terry Pratchett’s Discworld’, Fabulous Realms, 23 Mar. 2012, https://ashsilverlock.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/a-visit-to-discworld, accessed 1 April 2023.

4. 4.  ‘Narrativium’, https://wiki.lspace.org (2012), accessed 27 January 2024.

5. 5.  Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett, Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch (London: Random House, 2011), pp. 1–2.

6. 6.  Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay (London: Corgi, 1997), p. 136.

7. 7.  Pratchett, Feet of Clay, p. 39.

8. 8.  ‘Category: Discworld Publications’, https://wiki.lspace.org/Category:Discworld_publications (2012), accessed 29 November 2022.

9. 9.  Jim Shanahan, ‘Terry Pratchett: Mostly Human’, in Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction, ed. by Bernice Murphy and Stephen Matterson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 31–40 (p. 33).

10. 10.  Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (London: Random House, 2011), p. 38.

11. 11.  Richard Gameson, ‘The Medieval Library (to c.1450)’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. I, To 1640, ed. by Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 13–50 (p. 29).

12. 12.  Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Chained Library: A Survey of Four Centuries in the Evolution of the English Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931; repr. 2011), p. 3.

13. 13.  Terry Pratchett, Eric (London: Victor Gollancz, 1990), p. 8.

14. 14.  Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic (New York and London: Harper Collins, 1986), pp. 8–9.

15. 15.  Terry Pratchett, Soul Music (London: Random House, 2009), p. 152.

16. 16.  Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky (London: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 98–9.

17. 17.  Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals (London: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 30.

18. 18.  Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant (London: Random House, 2008), p. 127. Italics in original.

19. 19.  Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment (London: Corgi, 2004), p. 257.

20. 20.  Terry Pratchett, The Truth, p. 39.

21. 21.  Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment, p. 289.

22. 22.  Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment, pp. 27–8.

23. 23.  Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum (London: Corgi, 1999), p. 318.

24. 24.  Clémentine Beauvais, The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015), p. 16.

25. 25.  Beauvais, The Mighty Child, p. 19.

26. 26.  The ‘That’s Not My …’ series with Usborne has seventy-six texts following the same formula. See Usborne, https://usborne.com/books/browse-by-category/baby-books,accessed 15 January 2023.

27. 27.  Terry Pratchett, Thud! (London: Transworld, 2005), p. 125.

28. 28.  Terry Pratchett, ‘Straight from the Heart, Via the Groin’. Speech given at Noreascon 2004, Worldcon, in A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction (New York: Doubleday, 2014), pp. 44–64 (p. 59).

29. 29.  Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant, p. 225.

30. 30.  Lisa Surridge, ‘Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction by Peter Thoms (review)’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 69(1) (1999/2000), pp. 250–5 (p. 251).

31. 31.  Terry Pratchett, Night Watch (London: Transworld, 2002), pp. 99–100.

32. 32.  Pratchett, Feet of Clay, p. 16.

33. 33.  Pratchett, Thud!, p. 32.

34. 34.  Pratchett, Thud!, p. 144.

35. 35.  Pratchett, Thud!, p. 144.

36. 36.  Pratchett, Thud!, p. 195.

37. 37.  Pratchett, Thud!, p. 149.

38. 38.  Pratchett, Thud!, p. 219.

39. 39.  I borrow this term from Roderick McGillis’s The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (New York: Twayne, Prentice Hall International, 1996)

40. 40.  Beauvais, The Mighty Child, p. 72.

41. 41.  Pratchett, Thud!, p. 152.

42. 42.  ‘Book: Where’s My Cow?’, https://wiki.lspace.org/Book:Where%27s_My_Cow%3F, 2023, accessed 1 April 2023.

43. 43.  Raymond J. Clark, quoted in Keira Vaclavik, Uncharted Depths: Descent Narratives in English and French Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 3.

44. 44.  Terry Pratchett, ‘Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories’. The Eighteenth Katharine Briggs Memorial Lecture, November 1999, Folklore, III (2000), 159–68 (p. 159).

Bibliography of secondary literature

• About Discworld & Terry Pratchett Wiki (2012), https://wiki.lspace.org/Main_Page
• Beauvais, Clémentine, The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015)
• Gameson, Richard, ‘The Medieval Library (to c.1450)’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. I to 1640, ed. by Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 13–50
• McGillis, Roderick, The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (New York: Twayne, Prentice Hall International, 1996)
• Pratchett, Terry, ‘Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories’. The Eighteenth Katharine Briggs Memorial Lecture, November 1999, Folklore, III (2000), 159–68
• Pratchett, Terry, ‘Straight from the Heart, Via the Groin’. Speech given at Noreascon 2004, Worldcon, in A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction (New York: Doubleday, 2014), pp. 44–64
• Shanahan, Jim, ‘Terry Pratchett: Mostly Human’, in Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction, ed. by Bernice Murphy and Stephen Matterson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 31–40
• Streeter, Burnett Hillman, The Chained Library: A Survey of Four Centuries in the Evolution of the English Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931; repr. 2011)
• Surridge, Lisa, ‘Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction by Peter Thoms (review)’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 69(1) (1999/2000), 250–5
• ‘Terry Pratchett’s Discworld’, Fabulous Realms, 23 Mar. 2012, https://ashsilverlock.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/a-visit-to-discworld
• Vaclavik, Keira, Uncharted Depths: Descent Narratives in English and French Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2017)