Thursday extracts. Terry Pratchett on books and libraries

Where to begin with Terry Pratchett? Practically any sentence he wrote could be given as a fantastic example of great writing, amazing humour, wonderful imagination, or just the vast range of knowledge the man has to apply from Roundworld to his creation.  Six-foot dwarves, gargoyles on stake-outs, dragons as pets, an orang-utan librarian, almost everything he writes is a fresh view of a potentially tired topic.

I figured the best thing would be to use part of his view on books, and more particularly, his concept of L-space, the mysterious effect that large collections of books can have on the world around them.

The following extract comes shortly after a discussion of the dangers to be found in the magical library at Unseen University, but demonstrates perfectly how Pratchett's Discworld relates to our own round planet.

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Even big collections of ordinary books distort space and time, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned second-hand bookshop, one of those that has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves that end in little doors that are surely too small for a full sized human to enter.
The relevant equation is Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. Mass distorts space into polyfractal L-space, in which Everywhere is also Everywhere Else.
All libraries are connected in L-space by the bookwormholes created by the strong space-time distortions found in any large collection of books.

Guards! Guards!
First published 1989
Terry Pratchett