A first edition of the Discworld map, illustrating Pratchett and Briggs's absurd and enchanting world.

The Books
Balanced atop four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle, the flat planet of Discworld was the setting of 41 novels by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, published from 1983 until the final posthumous volume appeared in 2015. Filled with absurdly comic characters, such as the useless and cowardly wizard Rincewind, who nonetheless ends up saving Discworld on multiple occasions, Pratchett's series also features cunning and more subtle satire.

There is police corruption, psychology, or "headology", practised by witches, and ethnic tension between dwarf and troll populations. These all-too-familiar themes are made increasingly absurd as they occur on Discworld, where the laws of physics are turned inside-out and magic is everywhere. In the 1990s, Pratchett and Briggs produced four maps of their fictional world, two drawn by Stephen Player and two by Paul Kidby; the present map of the planet is the second in the series.

The Map
The huge turtle, Great A'Tuin, supports the disc planet on which one main land-mass and numerous smaller islands are shown. Different regions of the land are labelled, including the "Agatean Empire", "Tito Desert", "Uberwald" and "Klatch", while geographical features such as rivers, mountains, deserts and lakes are illustrated and named. Notable places from the novels are shown, including "Cori Celesti" the mountainous home of the gods, and the principal ciyy of Ankh-Morpork, the official mottor of which is "Quanti canicula ille in fenestra" ("How Much is That Doggie in the Window") and the unofficial, "Attack us, and we'll call in your mortgages".

In the waters appear a variety of vessels and sea-dwelling creatures, from fish to monsters to mermaids. Around the outer edge of the planet, Discworld's cardinal directions of "turnwise" (direction of the disc's rotation) and "widdershins" (against the direction of the disc's rotation) are written either side of the turtle's head. In the lower left-hand corner the scale bar is found in a banner accompanied by an owl holding a pair of compasses. Other typical decorative features such as windheads and putti have been adapted: a scrawny old man hovers in the lower right-hand corner, straining to produce a gust of wind from his mouth; rather than plump young boys, winged eyeballs float around Discworld.