The Brothers Grimm analogy is an interesting one, as the ancient folk tale was the origin of the fantasy story. Andrew Lang built upon this in a very late-Victorian type of way with his series of coloured Fairy Books, and Arthur Rackham built upon it even further by drawing and painting very sensual-looking fairies in anything from The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.* Pratchett was fully aware of all this and embraced – and parodied – much of this history of fairy tale/fantasy in his works. Because he had studied it so well, he could avoid fantasy or dip into it whenever he wanted. But with the Bucks Free Press stories, perhaps he was still getting the traditional values of fantasy out of his system; indeed, he wallowed in them sometimes.
On 31 December 1965, he wrote a two-part story (concluding on 7 January 1966) about a factory. The first thing that we note is the tea made by the apprentice in the factory: spoons can stand up in it because it’s so strong. There’s some delicate humour here but also some hard lessons in life, because part one of the story ends with the realisation that the factory – which manufactures a certain type of pin (shades of a pin-loving postman from Going Postal looming here perhaps) – will go out of business because it can’t mass produce its ‘thrist pin’. In fact, it can only produce one a year, while the new factory across the road can produce 50,000 a second.
The 12 books that make up Andrew Lang’s coloured Fairy Books are extremely important to the documentation of fairy stories. Most of the stories compiled by Lang had their first English-language publication in his books, with some translated by his wife. A full collection is extremely collectable in first editions. They are detailed in the Further Reading section of this book, along with other key works in the fantasy genre.
The moral of the story turns out to be that the one pin manufactured every year is used every year by the special machine that built it; nobody else anywhere needs such a pin. The company across the road had been built out of greed. They had failed to do any market research and found no demand at all for their product.
This very gentle but highly moralistic story has a similar blend of originality and morality as the best of Roald Dahl’s children’s novels, bearing in mind that Dahl’s first bestselling children’s novel was still about two years away.
Pratchett had instantly found a voice in Uncle Jim. He has since said that his career in journalism helped him as a novelist and this is clearly showcased through his Children’s Circle stories.
Another important example of Pratchett’s Uncle Jim stories is a one-episode story dating from 11 February 1966. It is significant because it demonstrates Pratchett’s interest in historical events and twisting them to his own comic ends. It takes the Industrial Revolution as the setting for the story, turning Isambard Kingdom Brunel (the Victorian engineer of railways and steam ships) into Isombard Nuisance Funnel, the inventor of the Steam-operated House. Pratchett’s sense of fun is there straight away, along with his ability to turn historical characters and facts on their head and create an ingenious, albeit very short, story into the bargain.
‘What we must invent,’ Funnel told the men in his factory, ‘is something that will work a lot better than this new-fangled electricity, and costs a lot less.’
(From a one-episode short story, Bucks Free Press, 11 February 1966)
We can see how Uncle Jim taught Pratchett to keep things tight and succinct, as dictated by the word count for each episode, and although little attention is given to his Bucks Free Press stories nowadays, one should not overlook them, if only for their endearing fun.
It is true that Pratchett’s heart was firmly set on the fantasy and science fiction genres. He admits to watching the very first episode of Doctor Who on 23 November 1963, at exactly the same time he was reading so voraciously, so the combination of TV and literature was very important to him, as indeed was the cinema.
Every budding author is told to write about what they know, and Pratchett did that from day one. He had read The Wind in the Willows and The Lord of the Rings before sitting his school exams, and that awareness of the fantasy genre paid dividends when he began to write for the Bucks Free Press. His ‘bolshy’ attitude (let’s call it determination) fuelled his desire to be a creative writer, even though he would not arrive at the Discworld series until 15 years later. By then, however, he was refusing to churn out tried-and-tested fantasy material – he had outgrown all those clichés and he wasn’t afraid to say so.
‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.’
William Shakespeare
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
‘I never expected to make money.’
Terry Pratchett
In October 1968, Pratchett married Lyn Purves at the Congregational Church in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. He was 20 years old and his life was moving at lightning pace. He was still writing his column for the Bucks Free Press, along with other news items and features. Shortly before his marriage he interviewed Peter Bander van Duren, co-director of publishing company Colin Smythe Limited. Van Duren had edited a book about how the educational system would look over the next ten years (Looking Forward to the Seventies). It was during this meeting that Pratchett told van Duren that he had written a novel called The Carpet People and wondered if he would consider it for publication. Van Duren said that they would be interested and passed the manuscript to his co-director Colin Smythe.
It didn’t take long for Smythe to work out that they had a very talented young man on their hands, and he asked Pratchett to produce approximately 30 illustrations for his novel. Pratchett would draw and paint the illustrations throughout 1969 and 1970, and the book was published the month after his third wedding anniversary, in November 1971.
Smythe and van Duren wrote publicity material, the blurb on the inner flap of the book making it very tempting for younger readers: ‘There is magic in every carpet. Cities and villages exist right under your feet and the people who live there are so small that each tuft of wool stretches high above them like great trees.’
Although they are becoming less common today, up until the new millennium it was almost standard practice for publishers to hold a book launch for new and important titles. Journalists, editors and freelance reviewers would be invited along to raise a glass or two to the new release and meet the author. The launch for The Carpet People took place in the carpet department of the upmarket furniture store Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road in London. The trade turned up with their light blue invitations to the launch – the publicity folders had been illustrated by Pratchett – and were handed a cocktail called Essence of Underlay (the recipe for which, Colin Smythe tells us, is now lost). Large card images of the Carpet People were displayed in front of carpets in that department and Pratchett drew his characters on other sheets