Talk:Book:Mrs Bradshaw's Handbook

This is an interesting miscellany and adds a lot of small pertinent detail to the Discworld, or at least to the Sto Plains. I'm impressed: a lot more of it reads as if it directly originated with Pterry than I thought. It doesn't appear to be ghost-written, or not very much. Or else it's done by somebody who has the Terry P style off down to 98% accuracy.

It's punctuated with nice drawings which offer a different artist's perspective on the Discworld and Discworld characters and types. I'd say I'm not too happy with the way Goblins tend to be drawn as smaller humans with pointier ears. You'd expect them to be a bit more other than that. And an "alpine" hiker with a strange resemblance to one Adolf Hitler appears on page 138, in the middle of a group of determined and intent hikers of the Eric Wheelbrace persuasion. (nice touch!) Illustrations by Peter Dennis.

You also get a lot of those faux-Victorian/Edwardian advertisements for goods and services that appear in The Compleat Ankh-Morpork, which is welcome. I think I'm going to like this book - there's a lot more between its covers than you'd expect at first glance! AgProv (talk) 23:01, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Another quibble: if Ankh-Morpork manages a population now estimated at 1.2 million, the stated population figures for other large towns and cities are unfeasibly small. (London has a population of nine million; applying the same proportions, places like Watford, Reading, St Albans, Luton, et c, should all have minimal populations of 15,000 - 40,000 with the largest satellite town having perhaps 70,000 - 80,000. The populations of all London's satellite towns are way larger, by a factor of three or four. You'd expect the same of satellite towns serving Paris, Berlin, New York, Toronto, et c.) So Sto Helit's 9,800 and Quirm's 13,700 don't ring true: you would expect both to be a lot more populous. AgProv (talk) 23:55, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

You're right; the populations are unreasonable for Roundworld but this is Discworld, where all the knobs are turned up to 11. Ankh-Morpork is the Big City; all others are Small Towns of different kinds if not Rural Backwaters inhabited by ignorant but sometimes canny hayseeds. How the few hundred citizens of Lancre support a monarchy or Sto Lat a small empire are small mysteries compared to the reclamation of the rimfall or the single-Patrician hypothesis. --Old Dickens (talk) 03:07, 29 November 2014 (UTC)