The only other Moist von Lipwig title - Going Postal is, if not my favourite Discworld book, then certainly in the top three. (Top being NightWatch)
I guess there was a nice little hint to this new novel in the last novel. The idea that stamps could and were being used as a form of currency.
I can’t bloody wait. I have to admit that new discworld books are more eagerly anticipated than new Harry Potter books for this reader. I can’t get enough.
I hope old Vimesey features somewhere in the new book. And Death too. He almost never (‘almost never’ what a neat oxymoron) fails to turn up in a Discworld book.
I believe the corret term is “never fails.” I can’t think of a single book he isn’t in, in some fashion or another. Although I must confess that I own, but have not read, the complete Tiffany Aching saga. Wintersmith is still in the “to do” pile.
I’ve had Making Money ordered ever since Amazon.uk put it up.
It’s possible Pratchett gives a reason, but really, a lot of Discworld happenings don’t really make logical sense except in the context of parodying reality. The stamp itself was just such a thing, IMO; the process Moist went through to create it seemed overly contrived and probably wouldn’t have happened were Pratchett not setting out to parallel the current postal service.
Ankh-Morpork’s stamp-production capacity may not be adequate to meet the higher demand for stamps that would exist if every resident was carrying them around in quantities sufficient for everyday transactions. An average resident might send one letter a week, or even one a month, or no letters at all. (What’s the literacy rate in Ankh-Morpork?) But people buy things almost every day.
As a result, there’s going to need to be a massive scaling-up of whatever machinery and process is involved in making any Morporkian Dollar. Of course, that’s not an argument against using stamps as the official currency in and of itself - but so long as a massive development project is required to create a paper currency, whether or not it’s going to be stamps, there could be some good arguments against using postal stamps:
1.) Counterfeiting. The existing postage stamp designs might be relatively easy to counterfeit. So long as they’re useful primarily just for sending letters/packages, the incentive to counterfeit is limited - but that incentive grows tremendously if stamps can be used to buy bread/drugs/strippers/etc.
2.) Convenience/Durability. Stamps are small. This makes them harder to handle than a larger bill would be. It also makes them less durable - I can inflict all sorts of abuse on a dollar bill that would render a 35-cent stamp unusable. (Spilling beer, tearing, and so forth.)
3.) Prestige. A special dollar bill might feel more like “real money” than an ordinary stamp. That’s important - if people don’t think a stamp is real money, they won’t use it, and they won’t accept it unless Morporkian law demands they do so, and there’s real enforcement. If you want people to actually use the new currency, making it look like what people think currency should look like is a good first step.
I didn’t even know this was in the works, so thank you for posting about it. I will most certainly read it. I don’t like all of his books, most of the Witches series bores me to death (I did like Witches Abroad) but Vimes, Rincewind, and now I love Moist! So I am definitely looking forward to it.
I’m certain that the novel will somehow incorporate the fact that paper money- indeed banks, stock exchanges and much of the economy itself- is a polite lie that only works because enough people believe in it and usually don’t ask too many questions. This was presaged in Going Postal as well, where the money men get together to bail out the looted bankrupt Clacks network. Maybe Lipwig will start a rumor that some foreign emperor has vast reserves of gold and issue “receipts” for the gold that somehow never get redeemed for actual gold. And as I said in a previous post, it will probably be simpler to let the counterfeiters serve as the engraving bureau.
We always end up doing some stamping dies for Terry’s books and usually by that time they’re about two weeks away from the shelves. I haven’t seen the art yet but it could come in any time now.
