The Ultimate Discworld Companion

by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs

Genres: Humorous Fantasy

Synopsis

The absolute, comprehensive, from Tiffany Aching to Jack Zweiblumen guide to all things Discworld, fully illustrated by Paul Kidby.

The Discworld, as everyone knows, is a flat world balanced on the back of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the shell of the giant star turtle, the Great A'Tuin, as it slowly swims through space.

It is also the global publishing phenomenon with sales of over 70 million books worldwide (but who's counting?). There's an awful lot of Discworld to keep track of. But fear not! Help is at hand. For the very first time, everything (and we mean everything) you could possibly want to know has been crammed into one place.

If you need a handy guide to locales from Ankh-Morpork to Zemphis . . .
If you can't tell your Achmed the Mads from your Jack Zweiblumens . . .
If your life depends on distinguishing between the Agatean Empire and the Zoons . . .

Look no further. Compiled and perfected by Stephen Briggs, the man behind The Ultimate Discworld Companion's predecessor Turtle Recall, this is your ultimate guide to Sir Terry Pratchett's beloved fantasy world.

Release date: November 11, 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 528

Sample

Professor Sir Terry Pratchett OBE was the creator of the hugely successful Discworld series of novels and during his lifetime became Britain’s bestselling author of adult fiction.

His first published story, Business Rivals, was printed in his school magazine and then published in Science Fantasy magazine when he was just fourteen. Using the proceeds, Terry purchased his first typewriter.

He left school aged seventeen and worked as a journalist for his local newspaper, the Bucks Free Press. His first novel, The Carpet People – developed from stories he had written for the weekly children’s section of the newspaper – was published in 1971.

In 1979 Terry was appointed publicity officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board, where he remained until 1987. During this time, he wrote the first four Discworld novels – The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites and Mort. In September 1987, after completing Mort, he gave up his job at the CEGB and devoted himself fulltime to writing.

His interests were wide-ranging and eclectic, and are reflected in his books, which are littered with esoteric ideas and wisdom – from beekeeping, folklore and cheese-making, to quantum mechanics, astronomy and the finer aspects of Morris dancing.

Terry was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998 and knighted for services to literature in the 2009 New Year Honours. He used the latter accolade as justification for forging his own knightly sword – Thunderbolt Iron – using iron he smelted himself.

In 2001, he won the Carnegie Medal for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and went on to receive many literary awards, ten honorary doctorates and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, eventually earning the full title of Professor Sir Terry Pratchett, OBE, Blackboard Monitor, Adjunct of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing and the School of English at Trinity College Dublin.

In 2007, Terry announced that he was suffering from posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease. Despite this embuggerance, as he came to call it, he subsequently penned a further twelve bestselling novels, made several award-winning documentaries and campaigned tirelessly for Alzheimer’s research and the right to die with dignity.

Terry died peacefully in March 2015 at his home in Wiltshire, with his family by his side and his cat asleep on his bed.

His final request was that the hard drive containing his unfinished novels be either crushed by a steamroller or fired into space. His assistant and friend, Rob Wilkins, chose the former, having decided that launching a rocket from their rural office in Wiltshire might be impractical.

Stephen Briggs was a collaborator with, and friend of, Terry Pratchett for more than 20 years.

They worked together to build the city of Ankh-Morpork, to create the Discworld on which it stands, and to put together a Companion to Terry’s wonderful world.

Stephen went on to collaborate with Terry on a number of spin-offs which expanded on the institutions and geography of his possibly fictional world. He has also dramatized twenty-two of Terry’s novels (so far) and recorded Terry’s unabridged audio books for various publishers in the UK and US.

Terry used to say of Stephen: ‘He knows more about Discworld than I do’. Less flatteringly, he described Stephen as Bosworth* (sic) to his Dr Johnson… hopefully, he was joking.

 

 

* For those unfamiliar with British history, Bosworth was the battlefield which saw the death of King Richard III – the last English monarch to die in combat. Dr Johnson’s sidekick, as Terry well knew, was called Boswell.

Paul Kidby has been wielding a pencil all his working life. As a young school leaver he was determined to teach himself the skills and discipline required to become a designer and illustrator. Paul read his first Discworld novel in his late twenties.

This was a seminal moment. Inspired to design and illustrate characters from The Colour of Magic, he hand-delivered his artwork to Terry Pratchett after queuing to meet him at a book signing. It was the beginning of a dynamic creative collaboration between author and artist, Terry wrote that he liked the reality of Paul’s work, and the feeling that he had ‘just strolled into the books with a sketchpad’.

Almost thirty years and many publications later, Paul has an astonishing archive of Discworld artwork, some of which can be seen here for the first time.

When I look back over the years since I last revised the introduction to the Companion, I am staggered at how much has happened.

My original introduction to the first Discworld Companion said: ‘Six years ago I was a civil servant who dabbled in amateur dramatics (er… I still am)’.

I’ve now left the civil service; it was taking over all my time. I don’t think that the work/life balance exhibited by Scrooge and Cratchit at the start of A Christmas Carol is actually a sound way forward … in fact, I firmly believe that a work/life balance is intended, implicitly, to include an element of ‘life’.

As many of you know, I fell into Discworld backwards, as if I’d been leaning on a rickety old door in a walled garden and I’d suddenly found myself in a magical kingdom full of snow, fauns and benevolent lions. I hadn’t meant to be here, but I’m jolly glad that I am.

I came across Discworld while looking for books to dramatize for my amateur drama club. We were the first people – anywhere in the world – to dramatize the works of Terry Pratchett. When I first wrote to Terry back in 1990 to ask permission to dramatize Wyrd Sisters, I little realized that in choosing that book to dramatize, I had made a really BIG life choice. I can still remember how worried we were when the author (then Mr Terry Pratchett) actually telephoned me – in person – to say that he wanted to come and see our little production. Would he like it? Would he let us do any more?

Wyrd Sisters went so well that we went on to stage twenty more Discworld books (so far!) plus three written for use by schools. Most of these have now been published, and have been staged by amateur drama clubs all over the world – Australia to Zimbabwe, Indonesia to Bermuda, Finland to France, South Africa to the USA. Even in the Antarctic – how cool is that? Along the way, they’ve raised tens of thousands of pounds for the Orangutan Foundation from their royalties.

Anyway, back to 1992. One day, when I was working on only my second Discworld play, I mentioned to Terry that I was convinced from my reading that Ankh-Morpork had a distinct shape. He doubted it – he said he’d just put buildings and streets in wherever the plot required them. I said that in this world they got put in wherever History demanded them and I was sure the city was mappable. Fine, he said. Go ahead.

And that led to The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, published in 1993, possibly the first map ever to get into the bestseller lists.

The arguments … er, discussions … and constant reference-seeking involved in that project led me to wonder out loud if it wasn’t time for a guide to Discworld.

And The Discworld Companion was born.

Since then, my own little ‘backlist’ has grown to include three maps, those dramatizations of twenty-two of Terry’s books – Wyrd Sisters, Mort, Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Maskerade, Carpe Jugulum, The Fifth Elephant, The Truth, Interesting Times, Night Watch, Feet of Clay, Lords and Ladies, Going Postal, Making Money, Monstrous Regiment, Unseen Academicals, Dodger, The Rince Cycle (a mash-up of The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic and snippets of Sourcery), Terry Pratchett: the Shakespeare Codex (a mash-up of The Science of Discworld 2 and lumps of Shakespeare!), Hogfather, Johnny & the Dead and The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, six diaries, a cook book and a graphic novel. Oh, and The Wit & Wisdom of Discworld – an excellent reminder of your favourite bits – or a way to ease newbies into the world of Terry.

It is still weird, when friends return from foreign travels to tell me they’ve seen the maps in a bookstore in Munich, the Companion at a French airport or, much more surprisingly, one of my plays in a bookshop in Zimbabwe.

The weirdness factor is compounded when, from time to time, I get a small package from Colin Smythe (Terry’s and my agent) containing translations of some of the above – the cook book in German, the Companion in French, a diary in Bulgarian or a map of Ankh-Morpork in Polish.

Several years ago now, I recorded a couple of lines to go into Dave Greenslade’s From the Discworld album … this was another happy accident, as I’d only gone along to the studio to dress up as Death for some publicity pix. From those two lines (‘The turtle moves’ and ‘Nevertheless, the turtle does move’), I moved on to record many of the unabridged books (initially for Isis Publishing, and latterly for Harper Audio (US) and other audio companies). These were a tremendous responsibility. It was nerve-wracking enough to have to replace the established artist (Nigel Planer), who had a loyal following among those who listen to the books on tape or CD, but I was also all too aware that Terry and his family used to receive – and listen to – early copies of the completed recordings.

Along the way, and again virtually by accident, I had found myself selling a range of Discworld merchandise to Terry’s readers across the globe. It all started with an Unseen University scarf, but went on to include enamelled badges, T-shirts, key-rings, tea towels, aprons, etc. Sadly, the pressures of my real-life job (as was) had obliged me to drop that little ‘spare bedroom business’.

Before I met Terry, I had no access to email or the internet at all, but now I am of course totally immersed in email, Facebook and Twitter, with email, Messenger and WhatsApp having replaced the paper-based alternative for 99 per cent of my correspondence. Even so, and much to Terry’s amusement and disgust, this Companion is still based on material captured on an old-fashioned card index. I used to remind him, though, that the cards are still as readily accessible as the day I wrote them. Any 1990s computer indexing program would be much more of a challenge!

Discworld has been very good to me, and I welcomed the limited chances I used to get to meet Terry’s readers, either at the conventions, less formal get-togethers or on those occasions when the publishers used to let me tag along to a book launch. It was really strange to see people wearing badges and shirts I’d created, or offering for signature diaries, maps, plays that I’d helped to create.

I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds.

TERRY PRATCHETT

Terry and I shared a sense of humour and an interest in the crazy stuff in our Roundworld which we later had to tone down to make it believable on his Discworld. But apart from that, I wasn’t an obvious choice – I wasn’t a fan, I didn’t read fantasy fiction, I wasn’t in publishing and I didn’t make things. I was also a Luddite about technology and didn’t even have an email address.

Terry and I became friends and (as you may know) we worked together on lots of projects. We had fun – touring the Royal Opera House and attending Phantom of the Opera to research Maskerade, running lines from Life of Brian at signing queues … ‘Crucifixion? Good … line on the left, one cross each’; or flying to Germany just to watch a production of MacBest (Wyrd Sisters), drink beer and eat Bratwurst… We also nurtured privately the illusion that we were the only people in the world who’d seen The Keep (1983 film).

Socially, Terry was funny, fun, challenging and good company. To work with, he was challenging, engaging, entertaining and bluntly honest. He was a loyal and hospitable friend – and he’s the person who first introduced me to The Princess Bride.

It was awful to learn of his ‘embuggerance’ – posterior cortical atrophy – a form of Alzheimer’s, and to know that it would, inevitably, steal him from us. It was a hammer blow when he died. It seems really odd to be producing this edition of the Companion without Terry’s cheerful and challenging input.

I still think about him every day – and I feel extremely fortunate to have been included in his Venerable Order of the Honeybee – with its responsibility to honour his Discworld.

But Terry’s books live on. When I left school, I worked for a couple of years for the Bodleian Library. I used to handle books that Henry VIII would have thought of as old. In 400 years, Terry’s books will still be here. His plots, characters, humanity and humour will be there to delight generations to come.

THIS FINAL EDITION

This edition, of course, now takes us all the way to The Shepherd’s Crown. It has been a sad task to put together what will be the final Discworld Companion. Both Terry and I expected him to carry on writing into his nineties, with me producing updated Companions every few years or so. Fate had other ideas.

When I revised the Companion in around 2002, I had to act like Legitimate First, gravedigger at the Cemetery of Small Gods (see Night Watch). I had to move some people out of the main cemetery of the Companion and into the charnel house of my card index to make room for all the new people, from new books, struggling to get in. So we lost quite a few more of those characters whose only function was to support a gag line, or to bop Rincewind on the head. Some of them still held on – Terry and I retained a soft spot for the bit-part players on the great stage of life. For this, Ultimate, edition, I went back to the original card index which we used for the first edition and I have added back in all the character references we dumped in Terry’s old office as we pieced together that first Companion. Background artistes from subsequent books have still had to take their chances; for them, just exisiting as a name isn’t necessarily enough.

So, sad to say, it means there really wasn’t room for Bob-Bob Hardyoyo, Germaine Trifle, Dozy Longfinger or Ronnie ‘Trust Me’ Begholder. Muted apologies to them, and many others – including Mrs Gibbons of 12 Dolmen View, Pant-y-Girdl, Llamedos (who, as you know, can be relied on to take in post for Evil Harry Dread).

One of the delights of the Companion is that it allowed Terry occasionally to expand on random aspects of Discworld; on topics he wasn’t able to cover in detail in the novels – such as Magic on Discworld. In that spirit, I have still incorporated material from those Discworld diaries which Terry and I wrote together. They contained some good background material, which I enjoyed researching and we both enjoyed writing. It gave Terry more chances to play with the backgrounds and histories of some key institutions in a little playpen that needn’t intrude into or slow down the actual plots of novels. It would have been a pity to see it all disappear because the diaries, by their nature, are only transient… they wither away like the purple lilac once their year is over.

In total contrast to my card index, trying to access the text of the original Companion from what counted as state of the art IT storage back in the 1990s has been a little more of a challenge. Technology, eh?

SPOILERS

Spoilers? Not a word we knew in this current context when we wrote the first Companion. It is really, really hard (even with Terry’s help) to avoid spoilers when writing about characters – especially those whose plots advance significantly during the books…. We have done our best – aimed to not give away too much about characters’ plot lines but, here and there, there may be the occasional spoiler. Please tread carefully. Darth Vader is Luke’s father – oops …!

RANDOMNESS

Terry and I delighted in being a bit arbitrary in who was included and how much they were included. I have retained this ‘personal’ approach. This is, in effect, the original Discworld Companion. It’s just that it now includes all the Discworld novels.

At some point in the distant future, a much drier and more complete Index of Absolutely Everything will be produced for those studying Sir Terry Pratchett for their doctorates.

Hopefully, you doctors of Pratchettology will also search whatever replaces bookshelves to locate and read this book, too.

Stephen Briggs

Oxfordshire 2021

 

‘I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of the telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.’

Dr. Seuss

It has been almost thirty years since I first discovered Discworld, when my sister sent me a copy of The Colour of Magic. Until then I had been working freelance in magazines, advertising and product design; the work wasn’t exactly creative and I was feeling uninspired. This gift introduced me to a writer who portrayed life with what Lewis Carrol described as a ‘visual squint’ – the books were funny, cynical, richly layered and teeming with idiosyncratic characters. There was depth and a serious commentary on society, yet written with the lightest touch and wrapped in a warm humour that made me laugh. Discworld was the fresh inspiration I craved and the next step in my professional journey beckoned…

My route to becoming the Discworld illustrator was not straightforward. I grew up in suburban London in the 1960s and ’70s. As a boy, there was a house on my street that I found fascinating. In the window was a skeleton. When I heard what the resident lady did for a living, I found her house all the more intriguing. But I was well into my teens before I dared knock on the door of Miss Ockendon, artist and creative taskmaster.

At that time, I had just dropped out of sixth form and was on one of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Youth Opportunity’ Schemes, making false teeth. I had been interested in art from an early age and this apprenticeship was the closest I could get to being a paid creative. Throughout my childhood I had always drawn for pleasure (and luckily had plenty of pens and paper as my dear dad was a stationery salesman). As a teenager I drew imaginative pieces influenced by my two main interests: fantasy literature and contemporary music – The Lord of the Rings and Kate Bush, The War of the Worlds and The Clash.

Aged seventeen, I finally plucked up the courage to introduce myself to Miss Ockendon. She had taught at The Ealing School of Art, the alma mater of Freddie Mercury, Ronnie Wood, Pete Townsend and one of my own art heroes, Alan Lee. She had also worked as an anatomical artist in operating theatres and was an adept draughtswoman and calligrapher. In no uncertain terms she told me that if I was serious about becoming an artist, I had to learn the nuts and bolts of my craft, starting with perspective, anatomy and composition. I had to ditch my imaginative illustrations and start drawing from life. I visited her every week, and she would set me challenges; technically I learnt a lot from her – but the most important thing I took away was that to be successful as an artist (or indeed anything else), you need discipline and an investment of serious time. That was the very beginning of my artistic development – and, eventually, a life-changing process.

By the early 1980s I was designing and hand-painting roller blinds in a factory. I was working, but not hard. My friend, Tony, and I would clock in and then go jogging around the Park Royal Guinness Factory (until Tony developed a yeast allergy and started frothing at the mouth). We then turned our attention to making bows and arrows to shoot across the department into giant rolls of cardboard. This stopped after we thought it would be fun if the arrows were flaming and we almost set the whole workshop on fire. Tony taught me to airbrush and I taught him what I had gleaned from Miss Ockendon.

By the mid 1990s I was a young dad, working as a commercial illustrator, first as a freelancer in London, designing greetings cards and packaging for videos and computer games, and later at Future Publishing in Bath, where I painted covers for magazines such as Commodore Format, Sega Power and also GamesMaster editions 1–34. I had the energy and optimism of youth but it did mean working a lot harder, the days of firing arrows were well and truly over. As the graphics of the games improved, I could see that it was only a matter of time before hand-painted artwork for these magazine covers would be superseded by computer graphics – it was time to find a new line of work.

That fateful twenty-ninth birthday gift from my sister was therefore timely. Terry’s characters in The Colour of Magic leapt off the page into my imagination and I felt compelled to draw Rincewind, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat and Cohen. I was unaware of Terry’s popularity, and it was a surprise to me when, in October 1993, I had to queue for two hours at the Bath branch of WHSmith to meet him. When my turn finally came, I handed him an envelope containing photocopies of my character drawings and my telephone number. I didn’t hear anything, and frankly I wasn’t surprised. It was a number of weeks later, when his signing tour was over, that Terry called me and enthusiastically suggested that we collaborate on some potential Discworld projects. It was a dream come true.

We began with The Pratchett Portfolio, published in 1996, and a series of prints, maps and diaries followed. I then illustrated Terry’s short novel The Last Hero, my first big Discworld project. When, sadly, Josh Kirby died in 2001 Terry asked me to take over the Discworld cover designs, an undertaking that left me feeling daunted and honoured in equal measure.

The characters depicted are such clear and recognizable ‘types’ that drawing them is a constant delight. I appreciate the way the writing pins the persona but in abstract terms, such as ‘predatory flamingo’, this gives me plenty of leeway for artistic interpretation. As Terry was fascinated by science and engineering, his fantasy is buttressed by a logic that makes it believable, with a limited amount of actual magic. My artwork celebrates this approach, and, like Terry, I also enjoy creating a sense of historical realism shot through with humour, so I feel his words and my pictures have a pleasing sense of unity to them. Terry liked to pepper his novels with cultural and literary references, from Shakespeare to Asimov, and sometimes it is fun to do something similar with my artwork, but only when the right and fitting occasion arises. Over the years I have parodied, amongst others, Peter Blake’s Beatles album cover, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Munch’s The Scream, Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump and Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

For the past three decades my work has been devoted almost exclusively to Discworld and my archive is expansive. To be able to assimilate this large collection for The Ultimate Companion is a treat for me, and there has been much rummaging in cupboards and extensive searching on hard drives for long-lost images.

I was delighted to have an excuse to draw some of Terry’s more obscure creations, such as one of Death’s garden gnomes and Horace the Cheese. Other illustrations have very rarely, if ever, had an outing in print, so this is their chance to be seen playing an integral part in the rich and intricate tapestry that is Discworld. Recently, I was asked by one of my Facebook followers if I ever get bored with re-drawing the same characters; my reply was that I view my work as progressive, I am always developing the character designs and pushing the proverbial envelope both with technique and portrayal – so, in short, I am never bored!

It was a joy to work with Terry and I consider myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity to realize his creations. Being an artist in his own right, he had a good sense of design and a keen eye for illustration. Sometimes he would challenge me by requesting I draw particularly complex subjects, such as the Floral Clock, and his brief for the cover of Snuff was a veritable shopping list of things to be included – all of which I managed to incorporate, even the chickens. We shared many meetings of collaborative creativity where we discussed the physical attributes and personal foibles of his characters. Special memories remain – such as the night he rang to invite me over to look at Saturn’s rings through his telescope and the afternoon he helped clear my pond while we chatted about ideas for new stories. Not all of those stories got written and his loss is felt by many, including me, every day.

Following his untimely death, I was honoured to become one of ‘The Venerable Order of the Honeybee’, a group of twelve people entrusted by Terry himself to oversee the safe future of his works. As I continue to illustrate Discworld and reinterpret the people and places that he wrote about so vividly, I endeavour to always give my artistic best to Terry’s wonderful legacy.

Paul Kidby

Dorset 2021

 

A name or word in SMALL CAPITALS indicates that it is the subject of a fuller, separate entry; regular references such as Ankh-Morpork, Granny Weatherwax and Unseen University are not normally flagged (they’re certainly not consistently flagged!).

The book where the character or reference first occurs is indicated with the following abbreviations. These are given at the end of each entry.

* In fact, there’s still very little included from The Science of Discworld series – the books are borderline canonical – so characters unique to those books (many of whom are from Roundworld) are not necessarily included. After all, the elves in the Science of Discworld series specifically sneer at the idea of being called Peaseblossom – even though that is the name of a major elf character in The (canonical) Shepherd’s Crown. A couple of named people may have managed to sneak out of Roundworld into this book. The Science of Discworld approach has also been taken with the later spin-offs (some diaries and a railway guide), to which Terry was not able to contribute personally in the way he used to.

** Short story published in After the King – it is, technically, not Discworld, but it made it into the first Companion and has now earned its right to stay.

*** Short story published in W. H. Smith’s Bookcase, now a collectors’ item.

**** Short story included in A Blink of the Screen.

† Collected in The Ankh-Morpork Archives Vol. I

†† Collected in The Ankh-Morpork Archives Vol. II

 

 

There was not a lot that could be done to make Ankh-Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification.

– Pyramids

Abbot, The. The 493rd Abbot of the History MONKS is an old man with wrinkled hands when we first encounter him during the events of Small Gods. And, by the time the events of Thief of Time occur, this dear, kind man’s teeth are giving him trouble and he is not walking very well. That is because, by then, he has been born again.

Although he is mentally around 900 years old and extremely clever, he has never mastered the art of circular ageing (crudely known as ‘immortality’). He has therefore been forced to achieve longevity in a more circular way, via serial reincarnation. The Abbot, in short, goes round and round, while managing to remember all his past lives; by Thief of Time he is a mere baby, although he is off the wet nurse (something of a trial for all concerned, in the circumstances) and onto less embarrassing fare, such as rusks. He travels around the Oi Dong Monastery in a sling on the back of an acolyte, often wearing an embroidered pixie hood to keep out the cold. His speech wavers between the sensible outpourings of a wise and very old man, and loud outbursts of babytalk when the infantile body takes over. He uses his wide selection of toys as apparently unintentional weapons against his recalcitrant colleagues, and many a monk has been struck by a random rubber yak, wooden giraffe or large wooden brick hurled from the Abbot’s pudgy little hands. It may well be, perish the thought, that having so recently had to put up with these people patronizing him and shouting things in his ear, he treats these juvenile periods as a welcome opportunity to settle a few scores. [SG]

Abbott, Jack. A lumberjack in Lancre, who lives with his mum in a rickety little hut. He was treated for a foot injury by Granny Weatherwax. [TSC]

Abbys, Bishop. Prophet of the Omnian Church, to whom the Great God OM is said to have dictated the Codicils to the Book of OSSORY. Little is known of this great man except that he had a big beard, because this is essential wear for prophets. On the subject of beards, the famous Ephebian riddle about them – All men in this town do not shave themselves and are shaved by the barber. Who shaves the barber? – caused some head-scratching when it was printed in an almanac that got as far as LANCRE. People there couldn’t see what was so philosophical about the statement because Lancre’s barber is one Mrs Deacon, who is open for haircuts, warts and teeth two mornings a week. [SG]

Abraxas. Ephebian philosopher, also called Abraxas the Agnostic, and ‘Charcoal’ Abraxas (because he had been struck by lightning fifteen times – which suggests that being an agnostic requires an enviable strength of mind, not to say thickness of skull. His own comment, just before the fifteenth stroke, was ‘They needn’t think they can make me believe in them by smiting m