The Annotated Pratchett File, v7a

Credits

[Note: This section was written for APF v7a.0, and has not yet been updated for APF v7a.5.]
People who write articles to alt.fan.pratchett or who e-mail me on the subject of annotations have by now learned to live with one thing: for the APF I will freely quote (i.e: steal) from everybody, without explicit permission or credit.

It’s not only that I think long lists of contributors’ names would be a bother to maintain (we’re literally talking about hundreds of names here), would make the APF even larger than it already is, and would be completely uninteresting to anybody except the contributors themselves; but doing it my way also allows me to edit, change, and mutilate the texts as I see fit without worrying about folks going “but that’s not what I said!”.

(The only exception to this rule, by the way, is the material I quote from Terry Pratchett himself: I do not edit or change any of that, apart from choosing a selection in the first place, fixing typos or obvious mistakes, and adapting punctuation to conform to the rest of the APF. In other words:

What You See Is What He Said.) Another rule that applies throughout the APF is that whenever you see the pronoun ‘I’ in an annotation, then it will always be me, the editor, speaking (unless explicitly noted otherwise, e.g. in Terry’s and other people’s quotes).

Apart from all the folks who contributed annotations, there are heaps of people who have gone out of their way to help me get the APF into its current form, and thanking them is certainly something that I don’t mind spending a few paragraphs on. So here is the APF Hall Of Fame:

Nathan Torkington, for the original afp Frequently Asked Questions list.

The idea for the APF can be traced back directly to his FAQ.

Sander Plomp, for the logs of early alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup traffic, and for coming up with the idea of making a LaTeX version of the APF.

Robert Collier, for all his help with designing and creating the HTML version of the APF.

Paulius Stepanas, for his help with the double page numbers—the “conversion function” will be a part of APF v9.0, I promise.

Trent Fisher and David Jones, for helping me out with Perl and LaTeX programming, respectively.

Andy “&.” Holyer, for his help with the Summary, for finding me a copy of Brewer’s, and for being an utter fountain of inspiration.

My faithful group of proofreaders, who have been with me since APF v6.0 and still show no signs of getting fed up: Ingo Brandauer, Andy Holyer, Debbie Pickett, Paulius Stepanas and Nathan Torkington.

And last, but not least, Terry Pratchett, for giving us something to annotate in the first place; for giving me permission to use quotes from his articles in the APF; and for having to put up with increasing numbers of fans who, perhaps because of the APF, have begun to think he is incapable of writing anything truly original. They should know better.