The Carpet People - Index page

What Terry does not mention in his Author's Note is that The Carpet People also had an illustrator -- and that that was the same person, too.

When the original version of The Carpet People was published in 1971, Terry himself drew the cover art, as well as about three dozen black and white interior illustrations. The revised edition of the book, released in 1992, had a new cover painting by Josh Kirby, and the text was no longer illustrated at all.

As copies of the 1971 edition have now become extremely rare collectors' items costing hundreds of pounds, there is little chance for the casual fan to have a look at Terry's artwork. This is a pity, because the illustrations are perfectly charming, and well worth investigating.

Even rarer are the copies of The Carpet People in which Terry himself coloured the illustrations with watercolour paint. Colin Smythe (Terry's agent) has no fewer than three of these rarities in his collection and was kind enough to provide us with high-quality scans of the illustrations. We are very pleased that we can now in turn make these available to a much wider audience.

The Carpet People -- 1971

We have divided the material into three subsections:

Coloured illustrations

The original black & white pictures, coloured in by Terry with watercolour paint.

Full page scans

Scans of entire pages with dedications, doodles and illustrations.

Launch party photographs

Photographs taken at the The Carpet People launch party in 1971.

Credits

We owe a major debt of gratitude to Colin Smythe who spontaneously volunteered to supply us with the colour scans from his personal copy of The Carpet People, and then had to engage in many a late-night battle with scanners, CD-writers, and other recalcitrant peripherals. We feel honoured to have him eager to contribute so much of his time and effort to helping us develop this little corner of on-line fandom.

Without Thom Willis, this section of L-Space would never have existed: it was all his idea to begin with. Thom helped select the illustrations, researched the titles and captions, and provided the original black and white scans we used in this section for many years, before upgrading to the coloured versions.

And finally, of course, many thanks to Terry Pratchett, who was kind enough to grant us the permission to do this project in the first place.

Copyright note

All illustrations and quotes from The Carpet People are the copyright of Terry Pratchett and Colin Smythe Ltd, and may not be reproduced without permission.