As most of you may know, the L-Space web does these files for Pratchett's books... eventually. The point is, they don't have one for Going Postal. Or for Thud, for that matter, and that may very well be an issue for a thread of its very own.

So what say you of making an Annotated File of our very own? Or files, for that matter?

Good idea!
Not that I have anything to add right now, but... I'll come back to this!

Yes, and I'll start by dropping in the one that causes a bit of a debate as to which one it references, but I think it means all at once:


The Smoking GNU:
[list:db7c65a82e]
[*:db7c65a82e]Refers to the GNU system for Linux - an alternate Operating System to Windows, as the Smoking GNU have an alternate system to the Grand Trunk
[*:db7c65a82e]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_gun - they are searching for the proof that Gilt is guilty. The irony is that they end making up the evidence to convict.
[*:db7c65a82e]And a few more that i forget right now[/list:u:db7c65a82e]

Sounds great.

Teemer & Spools:

Mr. Spools' name is a possible pun on a printer's spool, I.E the way the program managing your computer's printing tasks collects the jobs you send to the printer in a queue. Essentially, that's what Mr. Spools does with clients' jobs.

I'm also certain that Teemer & Spools is a parody of some printing company's name. Pratchett likes taking stuff from the Victorian era, I must note, so if someone is able to locate a a list of old printing companies, grateful we shall be.

Now, the penny stamp featuring Lord Vetinari's head is a reference to the first stamp issued, in Great Britian I might add, which had the likeness of Queen Victoria. It was known as the Penny Black.

edit: Victoria, dammit, Victoria!

There's an APF on www.wikilspace.org or the bginnings of one

Are you shure, does this link works?

What the squishy invertebrate actually meant was http://wiki.lspace.org

[quote:914289ae4e="Katcal"]What the squishy invertebrate actually meant was http://wiki.lspace.org[/quote:914289ae4e]

Thank you, Katcal. Well, as we've been mostly beaten in the case of this particular annotation file, we can either try to add to it, or go for Thud, which has hardly anything at all on the wiki.

Also, someone beat me on this one, as well as on the penny stamp:

[quote:67a7345768](p187 U.S. paperback)- " '... In Klatch there is a mountain with many caves, and in those caves are entombed more than a hundred thousand old books, mostly religious, each one in a white linen shroud.'" - In Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives religious leaders bury holy books/scrolls too worn down to use in religious services in "geniza"- special book tombs carved into caves. Since these are considered holy words they must treated with respect and so are not burned or thrown away. The nonfiction book "Where God Was Born" by Bruce Feiler describes a funeral ceremony he attended at a geniza.[/quote:67a7345768]