The Art of Discworld
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
The Art of Discworld Details
About the Author Sir Terry Pratchett was the internationally bestselling author of more than thirty books, including his phenomenally successful Discworld series. His young adult novel, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, won the Carnegie Medal, and Where's My Cow?, his Discworld book for “readers of all ages,” was a New York Times bestseller. His novels have sold more than seventy five million (give or take a few million) copies worldwide. Named an Officer of the British Empire “for services to literature,” Pratchett lived in England. He died in 2015 at the age of sixty-six.Paul Kidby became a freelance illustrator in 1986. Since then he has worked on projects ranging from computer game packaging to magazine covers. He began reading the Discworld novels in 1993 and was immediately inspired. He has produced, with Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, numerous Discworld items, including Discworld Diaries, The Discworld Portfolio, cards, book covers, and calendars. He lives in England. Read more
Reviews
Terry Pratchett's Discworld is an extraordinarily varied and detailed creation of fantasy-that-is-awfully-real (not to mention being seriously funny). I suppose all of us who are fans of this work carry an assortment of internal visual images of what the world and its inhabitants look like, but "The Art of Discworld" comes pretty close to showing us how Terry Pratchett envisions his own creation. The drawings and paintings are by Paul Kidby, and Pratchett assures us in the introduction that "Paul sees things my way about seventy-five per cent of the time, which suggests either mind-reading is happening or that my vision of my characters is really rather vagues until I see his drawings." The illustrations in the book are, as might be expected, numerous and wonderfully vivid, showing us everyone and everything (some of those things animate and some not) of importance in the Discworld universe. But as absorbing as the paintings are, they are matched in interest by Pratchett's comments on each character, telling us how they came about and how they have evolved over time. I would have a hard time selecting my favorite illustration from the book. Heck, I would have a hard time limiting my choice to the top ten -- or twenty -- pictures. "The Art of Discworld" is guaranteed to be a delight to any fan of Pratchett's fiction. Or as the Librarian would say, "Ook!"