I found this fair-condition paperback at a local Savers thrift shop, and as it's one of my favorite Discworld books I was delighted to have another release copy - all the more so after the sad news of Pratchett's passing in 2015.

I first discovered the Discworld series via BookCrossing, as it happens. For some reason, I hadn't read any of the Discworld novels, despite being a longtime fantasy fan; then I saw somebody's release of "Guards! Guards!" here at BC, and thought it looked entertaining. (I've always had sympathy for the poor underpaid, unrespected guards in every D&D game, fantasy novel, or war movie. All they ever get is silenced.) I suspect it was a mistake to dip into a Pratchett book, though, because now I'm hooked.

In this book, the Night Watch is at a low ebb - only three members left (there were four, but one of them was a bit too quick to pursue a criminal and accidentally caught one...). The dour Captain Vimes discovers that the new man is a 6-foot-something bundle of muscles named Carrot, who's been raised as a dwarf and has, in addition to incredible strength, a very literal mind. When a hilarious band of conspirators ("Oh, I thought you wanted the ELUCIDATED Brethren of the Ebon Night. Three doors down.") summons a dragon as part of a plot to (what else?) take over the kingdom, the hapless guards try to deal with it, though they'd much rather just crawl under the bed like everybody else...

It includes many, many delightful tidbits, including one of the most unlikely dragons in fiction - and then for the book-lovers, there's this reference to L-space (library-space), which explains a lot:

"The truth is that even big collections of ordinary [non-magical] books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than stories and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read."

And one of my favorite bits, from the dedication: "They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they wanted to. This book is dedicated to those fine men."

[There's a TV Tropes page on this book that's very entertaining, but do beware of spoilers; most are masked, but not all.]

I left this book, bagged against the rain, on a guardrail at the baseball field just across from the school. Hope the finder enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in NH here.]

*** Released for the 2017 E-less release challenge. ***