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Discworld’s publishing wizard Colin Smythe , the 2024 Visiting Terry Pratchett Fellow at Trinity, reflects on his lifelong passion for publishing and his pivotal role in bringing Terry Pratchett’s magical Discworld novels, and over 600 other works, into the world
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W hat does it mean to love writing? To read it, first, and then to create it oneself, are surely the obvious answers. What about printing it, and bringing it out to the world? The occupation of publishing weighs less in the mind than the first two passions, but is a matter of huge importance, all the more now that digital distribution has hollowed out much of the status publishing won for itself over the centuries following Gutenberg. The Visiting Terry Pratchett Fellow at Trinity in 2024, Colin Smythe, speaks of books the way the most obsessive collectors treat their objects of ardour: details are to be pinned down, details are perhaps the point. He knows the precise print runs of special editions, the destiny of rare volumes, as well as the origins of the ideas inside them and the outlines of the lives of their authors, taking relish in sketching out how they have overlapped and intertwined with his own. Colin is an alumnus of the university, where he attended in the 1960s, nourishing an appreciation for WB Yeats and the other magi of the Celtic Twilight. These writers, whose works he would go on to publish over the decades, carried a yearning for the possibility of magic into the heart of their aesthetics. For them, the suggestive possibility of casting a spell prefigured the possibility of bringing a new nation into existence, as well as foreshadowing the whole of artistic creation itself - absorbing all that in the post-war Dublin atmosphere yielded a taste for the magical and the occult that shaped the publisher that Smythe would become. If the early immersion in Irish letters forms one main narrative of Colin’s life in books, the other must be meeting his friend and author, Terry Pratchett, whose works are now the centre of Trinity’s Terry Pratchett Project. Launched in 2018, as a focal point for research and appreciation of Pratchett, the project celebrates the affection the English writer seeded there while teaching as an adjunct professor in 2010. This was just three years after his diagnosis with Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a condition that later progressed into Alzheimer’s disease, and five years before his passing in 2015. Becoming an advocate for the right to assisted suicide and a promoter of the importance of awareness around neurological health, Pratchett’s attention to brain research also forms a priority of the project named for him. Dementia and Alzheimer’s are cruel to anyone, perhaps especially so for geniuses who work with the mind’s capacity for magic, attention to detail and invention. Of Terry’s methods, Colin summarises: ‘He really was tremendously skilled, a genius, and a compulsive writer as well. He couldn’t stop writing, usually a minimum of four hundred words a day when he really got down to it. Beforehand he was slow because he only wrote novels during the winter. In the summer he was out in the garden.’ At his home near Salisbury in Wiltshire, not far away from Stonehenge, Pratchett adapted a former tennis court into a water garden that his friends recall as a focus of loving attention. The creation of a garden as a model world is apt for the creator of worlds that Pratchett was, and the magical birth assistant that Colin Smythe would become, both to the Discworld novels and to some ‘six or seven hundred’ other works, in his estimate.
