The Spell Rincewind knows

pg 47

Rincewind has been expelled from Unseen University because "for a bet, he had dared to open the pages of the last remaining copy of the Creator's own grimoire, the Octavo (while the University librarian was otherwise engaged.) The spell had leapt out of the page and instantly burrowed deeply into his mind, from whence even the combined talents of the Faculty of Medicine had been unable to coax it. Precisely which one it was they were also unable to ascertain, except that it was one of the eight basic spells that were intricately woven with the very fabric of time and space itself."

In future books in the Discworld saga, it will be revealed that the Librarian had been turned into a orangatang because of a "magical accident." This accident is not going to take place in The Colour of Magic but rather in Sourcery, the second book in the series, and even then it's just mentioned in passing. The Librarian will not take on a larger role in the series until a few books later.

What's a Grimoire?

A grimoire (grim-wahr) is a textbook of magic. Such books typically include instructions on how to create magical objects like talismans and amulets, how to perform magical spells, charms and divination and also how to summon or invoke supernatural entities such as angels, spirits, and demons. In many cases the books themselves are also believed to be imbued with magical powers, though in many cultures other sacred texts that are not grimoires, such as the Bible and Qur'an, have also been believed to intrinsically have magical properties; in this manner while all books on magic could be thought of as grimoires, not all magical books could.

While the term grimoire is originally European, and many Europeans throughout history, particularly ceremonial magicians and cunning folk, have made use of grimoires, the historian Owen Davies noted that similar such books can be found all across the world, ranging from Jamaica to Sumatra, and he also noted that the first such grimoires could be found not in Europe but in the Ancient Near East.

It is most commonly believed that the term grimoire originated from the Old French word grammaire, which had initially been used to refer to all books written in Latin. By the 18th century, the term had gained its now common usage in France, and had begun to be used to refer purely to books of magic, which Owen Davies presumed was because "many of them continued to circulate in Latin manuscripts." However, the term grimoire also later developed into a figure of speech amongst the French indicating something that was hard or even impossible to understand. It was only in the 19th century, with the increasing interest in occultism amongst the British following the publication of Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801), that the term entered the English language in reference to books of magic.

Tweaking religion

Throughout the Discworld series Pratchett tweaks religion. Here's his first foray:

At the Temple of the Seven-Handed Sek a hast convocation of priests and ritual heart-transplant artisans agreed that the hundred-span high statue of Sek was altogether too holy to be made into a magic picture, but a payment of two rhinu (gold coins) left them astoundedly agreeing that perhaps He wasn't as holy as all that.

We also learn how photographs are made - a tiny homonculus lives inside the "magic box" and paints them. Pratchett will make use of this in future books as well.

The Color of Magic, Aphorism #1

pg 39

"When one foot is stuck in the Grey Miasma of H'rull it is much easier to step right in and sink rather than prolong the struggle."

Around pg 44 we learn that Twoflower is an insurance adjustor - he calculates risks. However, he apparently also sells insurance - or in-sewer-ants - and that will shortly play havoc with Ankh-Morpork.

Commercial: Rincewind from MicroArts

A company in Poland: http://www.shop.microartstudio.com/discworld-miniatures-c-48.html.

Figurines are shipped unpainted.

Albatross mail

pg 33

The Agatean Empire is Pratchett's version of China or Japan... (although Twoflower's clothing suggests an American tourist, the glasses are the stereotype of a Japanese tourist. All tourists - at least until recently! - know nothing about the currency of the country they visit, and so overspend, as does Twoflower.)

The Patrician tells Rincewind about the Counterweight Continent:
"Although it is not made of gold, it is true that gold is a very common metal there. Most of the mass is made up of vast deposits of octiron deep within the crust."

I'm reminded of a Twilight Zone episode from the late 1950s, in which 4 crooks steal a bunch of gold, hide in a cave and put themselves in to suspended animation for 100 years. When they wake up one is dead, killed by a rockfall that smashed his suspended animation chamber. Eventually only one is left, and he tries to make his way through the desert with a heavy bag of gold. He dies just as a family draw up in a car. He begs them to save him and says he will give them gold...

The "twist ending" is that gold is no longer valuable 100 years from now - vast deposits of it had been found which lowers the price dramatically.

Such it is in the Counterweight Continent. Because it is such a common metal there, it is not as valuable there as it is in Ankh-Morpork, which explains why Twoflower has such a lot of it.

The Patrician goes on to say:
"I may as well tell you, Rincewind, that there is some contact between the Lords of the Circle Sea and the Emperor of the Agatean Empire...It is only very slight. There is little common ground between us. We have nothing they want, and they have nothing we can afford.... so we exchange greetings by albatross mail."

Pigeons can fly from city to city, but to cross the oceans, an albatross is needed.

Albatrosses, of the biological family Diomedeidae, are large seabirds allied to the procellariids, storm-petrels and diving-petrels in the order Procellariiformes (the tubenoses). They range widely in the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific. They are absent from the North Atlantic, although fossil remains show they once occurred there too and occasional vagrants are found.

Albatrosses are among the largest of flying birds, and the great albatrosses (genus Diomedea) have the largest wingspans of any extant birds. The albatrosses are usually regarded as falling into four genera, but there is disagreement over the number of species. They have a wingspan of 11 feet.

Albatrosses are highly efficient in the air, using dynamic soaring and slope soaring to cover great distances with little exertion. They feed on squid, fish and krill by either scavenging, surface seizing or diving. Albatrosses are colonial, nesting for the most part on remote oceanic islands, often with several species nesting together. Pair bonds between males and females form over several years, with the use of 'ritualised dances', and will last for the life of the pair. A breeding season can take over a year from laying to fledging, with a single egg laid in each breeding attempt. A Laysan albatross, named "Wisdom" on Midway Island is recognized as the oldest wild bird in the world; she was first banded in 1956 by Chandler Robbins.

Of the 21 species of albatrosses recognised by the IUCN, 19 are threatened with extinction. Numbers of albatrosses have declined in the past due to harvesting for feathers, but today the albatrosses are threatened by introduced species such as rats and feral cats that attack eggs, chicks and nesting adults; by pollution; by a serious decline in fish stocks in many regions largely due to overfishing; and by long-line fishing. Long-line fisheries pose the greatest threat, as feeding birds are attracted to the bait, become hooked on the lines, and drown. Identified stakeholders such as governments, conservation organisations and people in the fishing industry are all working toward reducing this bycatch.

At this point in its history, Anhk-Morpork is a weak city - so says the Patrician - that could be destroyed by the Agatean Empire if it so desired. So the cowardly Rincewind is ordered to make sure that the tourist Twoflower is not harmed in any way during his visit.

Rods and cones in their eyes

pg 31

Wizards, even failed wizards, have in addition to rods and cones in their eyeballs the tiny octagons that enable them to see into the far octarine, the basic color of which all other colors are merely pale shadows impinging on normal four dimensional space.

From Wikipedia

Rods and cones

The retina contains two major types of light-sensitive photoreceptor cells used for vision: the rods and the cones.

Rods cannot distinguish colors, but are responsible for low-light (scotopic) monochrome (black-and-white) vision; they work well in dim light as they contain a pigment, rhodopsin (visual purple), which is sensitive at low light intensity, but saturates at higher (photopic) intensities. Rods are distributed throughout the retina but there are none at the fovea and none at the blind spot. Rod density is greater in the peripheral retina than in the central retina.

Cones are responsible for color vision. They require brighter light to function than rods require. In humans, there are three types of cones, maximally sensitive to long-wavelength, medium-wavelength, and short-wavelength light (often referred to as red, green, and blue, respectively, though the sensitivity peaks are not actually at these colors). The colour seen is the combined effect of stimuli to, and responses from, these three types of cone cells. Cones are mostly concentrated in and near the fovea. Only a few are present at the sides of the retina. Objects are seen most sharply in focus when their images fall on the fovea, as when one looks at an object directly. Cone cells and rods are connected through intermediate cells in the retina to nerve fibres of the optic nerve. When rods and cones are stimulated by light, the nerves send off impulses through these fibres to the brain.

Commercial: Death With Guitar

Here is a statuette of Death With Guitar from Soul Music - one of my least favorite Discworld novels, but that's neither here nor there.

$15.99 plus postage. Supplied unpainted.

Note I'm not affiliated with this site, nor are they paying me to showcase this statue. I'll be sharing photos and links like this at least once or twice a week, for those who want to start a collection.

http://www.coolminiornot.com/shop/miniatures/micro-art-studio/microartstudio-discworld/discworld-death-with-guitar-1.html

First mention of Death

Pg 31

"It is said that when a wizard is about to die Death himself turns up to claim him (instead of delegating the task to a subordinate, such as Disease or Famine, as is usually the case.)"

Death will appear later on in this book, having a somewhat different personality than the Death of the later novels.

I'll refer to that when it happens.

In future books, Death shows up for everybody - Disease and/or Famine, War and Pestilence become the four Horsepeople of the Apocolypse and we see them in Thief of Time.) They, like Death, have become avatars, humanoid figures who have gained human characteristics because of "living" among them for so long.

Rincewind abandons Twoflower

This is why I don't like Rincewind, and never have.

On pg 30:

"But what would happen to TWoflower, all alone in a city where even the cockroaches had an unerring instinct for gold? A man would have to be a real heel to leave him."

And he does.

The Patrician is actually one of my favorite characters, but the Patrician in The Colour of Magic is not the Patrician, even though in interviews Pratchett has said that it is. Well - he's wrong!

"The Patrician cradled his chins in a beringed hand, and regarded the wizard with eyes as small and hard as beads."

In other words, this Patrician is fat, and that is not the Patrician of Guards! Guards! and so on.

First description of Rincewind

pg 22

Watch Rincewind.

Look at him. Dcrawny, like most wizard, and clad in a dark red robe on which a few mystic sigils were embroidered in tarnished sequins. Some might have taken him for a mere apprentice enchanter who had run away from his master out of defiance, boredom, fear and a lingering taste for heterosexuality.

Zing!

Yet around his neck was a chain bearing the bronze octagon that marked him as an alumnus of Unseen University, the high school of magic whose time-and-space transcendent campus is never precisely Here or There.

Graduates were usually destined for mageship at least, but Rincewind - after an unfortunate event - had left knowing only one spell and made a living of sorts around the town by capitalizing on an innate gift for languages. He avoided work as a rule, but had a quickness of wit that put his acquaintances in mind of a bright rodent.

And he knew sapient pearwood when he saw it. He was seeing it now, and he didn't quite believe it.
In an interview, Pratchett said that he unwittingly took Rincewind's name from "Churm Rincewind", a fictitious person referred to in early Beachcomber columns in the Daily Express (an English newspaper).

Rincewind is the protagonist of the first two Discworld novels - The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic.

I personally dislike Rincewind, as I dislike all inept characters who are made the heroes of books. If The Color Of Magic had been my introduction to the Discworld, I probably would not have continued on. (Fortunately, it was Guards! Guards!)

Of course Rincewind is important to the saga of the Discworld because it's because of him that the Librarian was turned into an orangutang - but we'll come to that in due course.

The books featuring Rincewind:

The Color of Magic (1983) 1st novel in the series
The Light Fantastic (1986) 2nd novel in the series
Mort (cameo) (1987) 4th novel in the series
Sourcery (1988) 5th novel in the series
Eric (1990) 9th novel in the series
Interesting Times (1994) 17th novel in series
The Last Continent (1998) 22nd novel in series
The Last Hero (2001) 27th novel (or rather short novel)
Unseen Academicals (extended cameo) (2009) 37th novel in the series

The Color of Magic: Two Eyes, Not Four!

pg 16

Blind Hugh is standing on the wharves when a ship comes in with a fabulously wealthy passenger, Twoflower.

Blind Hugh is of course a takeoff on Blind Pew, from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

Blind Hugh greets the stranger, and "found himself looking up into a face with four eyes in."

Twoflower does not have four eyes - he's wearing glasses! Which apparently no one in Ankh Morpork has seen before.

Twoflower consults a Phrasebook as he talks to Blind Hugh, another take off on the poor unwary tourist.

The tavern to which Blind Hugh brings Twoflower is the Broken Drum. In subsequent books, it will be Mended.

The Color of Magic: Twoflower

Terry Pratchett is mocking the tourist with Twoflower - for example when he's first introduced he's "dressed very oddly in a pair of knee-length britches and a shirt in such a violent and vivid conflict of colors that Weasel's fastidious eye was offended even more in the half light."

That's the typical American in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. (Remember this was written in 1983, a few years before the fad of wearing baggy, over the knee shorts took off, and long before the fad of belting your shorts underneath your buttocks took off. Not that Twoflower would ever have done that.

Two-Flower's luggage is protected by "reflected-sound-as-of-underground-spirits."

That would be "echo-nomics." (The underground spirits being gnomes.)

Terry Pratchett bio from birth to The Color of Magic

Fro Wikipedia:
Background
Early life
Pratchett was born in 1948 in Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, England, the only child of David and Eileen Pratchett, of Hay-on-Wye. His family moved to Bridgwater, Somerset briefly in 1957, following which he passed his eleven plus exam in 1959, earning him a place in John Hampden Grammar School. Pratchett described himself as a "non-descript student", and in his Who's Who entry, credits his education to the Beaconsfield Public Library.

His early interests included astronomy; he collected Brooke Bond tea cards about space, owned a telescope and desired to be an astronomer, but lacked the necessary mathematical skills. However, this led to an interest in reading British and American science fiction. In turn, this led to attending science fiction conventions from about 1963/4, which stopped when he got his first job a few years later. His early reading included the works of H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle and "every book you really ought to read" which he now regards as "getting an education".

At age 13, Pratchett published his first short story "The Hades Business" in the school magazine. It was published commercially when he was 15.

Pratchett earned 5 O-levels and started A-level courses in Art, English and History. Pratchett's first career choice was journalism and he left school at 17 in 1965 to start working for the Bucks Free Press where he wrote, amongst other things, several stories for the Children's Circle section under the name Uncle Jim. One of these episodic stories contains named characters from The Carpet People. These stories are currently part of a project by the Bucks Free Press to make them available online. While on day release he finished his A-Level in English and took a proficiency course for journalists.

Early career
Terry Pratchett married his wife Lyn in 1968, and they moved to Rowberrow, Somerset in 1970. Their daughter Rhianna Pratchett, who is also a writer, was born there in 1976.

Pratchett had his first writing breakthrough in 1968, when working as a journalist. He came to interview Peter Bander van Duren, co-director of a small publishing company. During the meeting, Pratchett mentioned he had written a manuscript, The Carpet People. Bander van Duren and his business partner, Colin Smythe (of Colin Smythe Ltd Publishers) published the book in 1971, with illustrations by Pratchett himself. The book received strong, if few reviews. The book was followed by the science fiction novels The Dark Side of the Sun, published in 1976, and Strata, published in 1981.

After various positions in journalism, in 1980 Pratchett became Press Officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board in an area which covered three nuclear power stations. He later joked that he had demonstrated "impeccable timing" by making this career change so soon after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania, U.S., and said he would "write a book about my experiences, if I thought anyone would believe it".

The first Discworld novel The Colour of Magic was published in 1983 by Colin Smythe in hardback. The publishing rights for paperback were soon taken by Corgi, an imprint of Transworld, the current publisher. Pratchett received further popularity after the BBC's Woman's Hour broadcast The Colour of Magic as a serial in six parts, after it was published by Corgi in 1985.
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Discworld: The eight seasons

Pratchett goes into a bit of detail about the physical appearance of the Discworld in this first book, mentioning facts which are never repeated.

For example on pg 11, he states that the Discworld rotates once every 800 days ("to distribute the weight fairly upon itds supportive pachderms). (How could the Discworld rotate? Granted that it's a disc resting on the backs of four giant elephants, there's no way it could!)

The disc also has a tiny orbiting sunlet.

"Since the disc's tiny orbiting sunlet maintains a fixed orbit while the majestic disc turns slowly beneath it, it will be readily deduced that a disc year consists not of four but of eight seasons.The summers are those times when the sun rises or sets at the nearest point on the rim, the winters those occasions when it rises or sets at a point around ninety degrees along the circumference.

Thus, in the lands around the Circle Sea, the year begins on Hogs' Watch Night, progresses through a Sppring Prime to its first midsummer (Small God's Eve) which is followed by the Autumn Prime and, straddling the half-year point of Crueltide, Winter Secundus (also known as Spindlewinter, since at this time the sun rises in the direction of spin..."