He thought it would be a good idea but he was talked out of it by a friend, who said that sequels didn’t do well. “We were discussing at the time whether he would write a sequel. It sold fairly well, said Smythe – after a launch party held in the carpet department of Heal’s in London. Photograph: Terry PratchettĪround 3,000 copies of the novel, featuring Pratchett’s own illustrations, were printed in 1971, when Pratchett was 23. One of Pratchett’s illustrations in the original edition of The Carpet People. “This was written by a 17-year-old, and seemed to me to be showing great promise of a brilliant, if not yet genius, mind – a kid at 17 who was writing so well must logically get better as he improved with experience,” said Smythe.

Van Duren’s co-director Colin Smythe took a look, and ended up becoming Pratchett’s first publisher, and later his agent. The Carpet People manuscript was picked up when he interviewed a local publisher, Peter Bander van Duren, and mentioned that he was working on a book. There, he wrote news as well as more than 60 children’s short stories over 250 weeks, signing them as Uncle Jim. Pratchett left school in the middle of his A-levels when he landed a job as a reporter at the Bucks Free Press. Then came the soraths, and the weft borers, tromps, goats, gromepipers and the snargs.” First came the little crawling creatures that make their dwellings in burrows and high in the hairs. “Then came the dust, which fell upon the Carpet, drifting among the hairs, taking root in the deep shadows … From the dust the Carpet wove us all. It was young in those days,” writes Pratchett. Then came the Carpet, which covered the flatness. “In the beginning … there was nothing but endless flatness.

He was absolutely fascinated by a small, flat world.” They couldn’t wield needles as weapons they would be ginormous to them. He was thinking about this as a nano world. He was noodling around with ideas even then. “He was,” said Wilkins, “writing early versions of The Carpet People in short stories when he was at school, so this goes way back. ‘Don’t do that’, said Terry suddenly, ‘You’ll disturb the carpet people.’” Pratchett dreamed up The Carpet People as a teenager a 1971 interview revealed that he was “putting the world to rights … with a friend one evening when the friend got up to emphasise a point and started to pace across the room.

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