Fictional Reference Works

The Discworld's first newspaper, founded by a young man who wanted to write things down accurately and did not anticipate what that would cost.

The Sisterhood's private concordance of the world's faiths — the bibliographic marvel from which the Orange Catholic Bible was assembled, and with which the Bene Gesserit go on engineering religions after the assembly is finished.

Djelibeybi's guide to the afterlife, being a parody of the Egyptian Book of Going Forth by Day, adjusted for a civilisation with a relaxed attitude to punctuality.

A small brown book of the myths and legends of a dying Earth, carried across four volumes by a torturer who cannot forget anything he reads.

A dictionary of the opinions one is supposed to have, planned by two clerks as the only project left after agriculture, medicine, love, and archaeology have defeated them.

A book of pure mathematics so rarefied, Holmes says, that no man in the scientific press was capable of criticising it — which is the entire review, and the entire threat.

A compendium of all Galactic knowledge, compiled on a resource-poor planet at the edge of the spiral as a hedge against a coming dark age — and, it turns out, as a pretext for something else.

A standard Hogwarts textbook classifying the magical creatures of the world, and one of the few fictional books you can order tonight and have on your desk tomorrow.

Not a book: a palace. Every dream in the empire is to be written down, sent in, sorted, and read for the one that might topple the state.

Volume XI of a forty-volume encyclopaedia describing a planet that does not exist, in such completeness that the planet begins to.

A game, almost a liturgy, in which players make audible the correspondences between all the arts and sciences — the organ of a province that has withdrawn from history in order to play.

A treatise, endlessly footnoted, in which a savant argues that night is an accumulation of black air, that the earth is sausage-shaped, and that houses are a sanitary mistake.

A practising magician's book of English magic, written against his teacher's wish that the Raven King be shaken out of the subject like moths from a coat.

The standard history of the wizarding world, on every Hogwarts book list, and the first place Harry ever reads about himself.

An electronic guidebook in a plastic cover, more popular than the Encyclopaedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper and has the words DON'T PANIC in large friendly letters on the cover.

A cookery book by Nanny Ogg, published anonymously as "A Lady", in which almost every recipe turns out to be about something other than food.

A vast unfinished work intended to show that all the world's myths are corruptions of a single original revelation — compiled by a man who cannot read German, will not finish a chapter, and marries a young woman to be his secretary.

One of several biographies of Paul Atreides written by the woman who married him, never shared his bed, and was left with nothing to do but write the official record.

A textbook that has to be restrained with a belt, attacks anyone who opens it, and can only be calmed by stroking the spine. Flourish and Blotts keeps the stock in a cage.

A directory of the gods and demons of the Discworld, giving their names, addresses and summoning rites. Its author preferred to be known as Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches.

The only book of prophecy that is never wrong, and therefore the only one that did not sell — each prediction being perfectly accurate and perfectly useless to anyone except the descendant it was meant for.

The composite scripture of the Imperium, assembled after the Butlerian Jihad from the surviving religions of humanity. Its central commandment is directed at machines.

A history of the game from the marshes of Queerditch to the modern professional leagues, borrowed from the Hogwarts library and never quite returned on time.

A vast Latin work on noses, from which Tristram lifts one tale — a stranger, a long nose, Strasbourg in uproar — because his own biography has got stuck on the same organ.

A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name on the cover. Inside it explains how the world of Oceania actually works, in the voice of the man the Party has appointed as its enemy.

The register of Ankh-Morpork's noble families — their arms, their descent and their claims — and, in the hands of a policeman, a list of suspects.

A body of philosophy consisting entirely of the everyday sayings of an Ankh-Morpork landlady, revered by monks who have mistaken exasperation for enlightenment.

An interactive book that teaches, interrogates, and protects the girl who owns it — a Victorian primer rebuilt with nanotechnology, bound to one child's life.