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was the acclaimed creator of the global bestselling Discworld series, the first of which, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. In all, he was the author of over fifty bestselling books which have sold over 100 million copies worldwide. His novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he was the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal. He was awarded a knighthood for services to literature in 2009, although he always wryly maintained that his greatest service to literature was to avoid writing any.
Also by
For children:
The Bromeliad Trilogy: Truckers
Diggers Wings
The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy: Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead
Johnny and the Bomb
The Carpet People
Dragons at Crumbling Castle and Other Stories
The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner and Other Stories
Father Christmas’s Fake Beard
For young adults and above:
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (A Discworld® novel)
The Tiffany Aching Sequence (Discworld® novels):
The Wee Free Men
A Hat Full of Sky Wintersmith
I Shall Wear Midnight
The Shepherd’s Crown Nation
Dodger
Dodger’s Guide to London
By Rhianna Pratchett:
Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch
A full list of Terry Pratchett’s books can be found on www.terrypratchett.co.uk
Illustrated by Mark Beech
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First published 2025
Text copyright © Dunmanifestin Ltd, 2025
Illustrations copyright © Mark Beech, 2025
The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted
All stories contained in this collection were originally published in an untitled form in the ‘Children’s Circle’ section of Bucks Free Press in the following publication years: ‘Dragons at Crumbling Castle’ (1966); ‘Edwo the Boring Knight’ (1973); ‘Wizard War’ (1968).
‘Dragons at Crumbling Castle’ and ‘Edwo the Boring Knight’ were given their titles in the collection Dragons at Crumbling Castle, first published by Doubleday 2014. Text copyright © Dunmanifestin Ltd, 2014. Illustrations copyright © The Random House Group Ltd, 2014.
‘Wizard War’ was given its title in the collection The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner, first published by Doubleday 2016. Text copyright © Dunmanifestin Ltd, 2016. Illustrations copyright © The Random House Group Ltd, 2016.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive 2019/790, Penguin Random House expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception.
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ISBN: 978–0–241–72801–7
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Originally from the short-story collection Dragons at Crumbling Castle
Focus on a planet revolving in space . . .
Focus in on a small country in the northern hemisphere – Great Britain.
Closer, closer . . . and on the western edge of London you can see the county of Buckinghamshire. Small villages and winding country roads.
And if you could go back in time to the mid nineteen sixties, you might spot a young lad on a motorbike coming down one such
Terry Pratchett
lane, notebook and pen in his jacket pocket.
This is me. A junior reporter for the Bucks Free Press, sent out to cover stories on local events. If I was lucky, I would be going to something like a village fair – you know the kind of thing: men putting weasels down their trousers, people bobbing for frogs in a bucket, the odd cheese rolling too fast down a hill . . .
It was a lot of fun back then. And somewhere in the middle of it I taught myself how to write by reading as many books as I could carry home from the library. So then I began writing stories of my own – stories for young readers that were published every week in the newspaper.