Book:Making Money/Annotations

These are annotations for Making Money. Note that this book lacks an entry with any detail in the Annotated Pratchett File.

General Annotations

Annotations about general ideas and concepts in the book, rather than specific passages.

• Throughout the books are sly references to the Roundworld game of Monopoly, which involves a bank, financial speculation, capital investment in a city, and striving to reduce your opponents to absolute penury and degradation. This is dealt with in more detail here.

Specific Annotations

Page numbers refer to the UK hardcover edition unless specified. Equivalent pages in the US hardcover are given in parentheses where known.

Author's Note

"Hemlines as a measure of national crisis" Not much to add but a link is provided to this well-known (though not necessarily well-regarded) economic index.

Page 23

“’If it's about the cabbage-flavoured stamp glue-‘ Moist began.”

This is a reference to Vimes' statement on page 40 of Thud!: “‘Remember the cabbage-scented stamp last month?...They actually caught fire if you put too many of them together!’”

Pages 42-43

Discussing the Elim, the smallest coin of all, traditionally made by widows "and of course it's handy to drop in the charity box". In the bible, Jesus's parable of the widow's mite, in which the smallest coin of all, donated by a poor widow, has more value than all the gold ostentatiously placed in there by the Pharisees, simply because it is all she has to give.

p.61 (Harper Paperback)

"The crash of 88, the crash of 93, the crash of 98" It appears that the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork has entered the Century of the Anchovy & started using decimal years.

Page 109

“Food gets you through times of no gold better than gold gets you through times of no food” - this is a clever re-stating of Shelton and Mavrides' hippy maxim, used in their comic books about the alternative lifestyle trio The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, which originally states: "Dope gets you through times of no money better than money gets you through times of no dope."

And of course a form of "dope", considered superior by cannabis connoisseurs, is known as Acapulco Gold...

Page 127

"Jack Proust" is an aging comic, the central character in The First 100 Years, written and performed by former clown Geoff Hoyle.

Page 145 (Corgi Paperback UK)

"Ad Urbem Pertinet" = "Belongs to the City". Written on Von Lipwig's draft banknote, see also the following.

Page 146 (Corgi Paperback UK)

"promitto fore ut possessori postulanti nummum unum solvem an apte satisfaciam" = "I promise to pay an adequate defense, the owner asked for one piece”. Although that is the literal translation, this refers to the inscription on English banknotes, beneath the words "Bank of England", which read "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of" followed by the denomination of the note. Originally this meant the note would be exchanged by the bank for the equivalent value in gold; since Britain abandoned the gold standard the phrase is entirely decorative.

Page 155 (US 167)

"Bent stood up in one unfolding moment, like a jack-in-the-box." This foreshadowing will later prove as subtle as a pie in the face.

Pages 190-200 (US 208-218)

The Cabinet of Curiosity may be the Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, a natural history by Albertus Seba. The back cover of the book has a plate of a giant squid. (A lot of museums have a Cabinet of Curiosity as part of their collection.)

Page 214 (US 236)

The unusual font indicating the archaic language of Formal Golem uses the Enochian alphabet created by the 16th Century mathematician and astronomer John Dee. It uses letter by letter substitution to create the effect. The Formal Golem language is designated as appropriate to a near-contemporary of Umnian's multi-meaninged tongue. The characters for r/m, i/y, c/k, and u/v/w are effectively indistinguishable, and the s and e are quite similar. Translated, Adora Belle says "I can speak formal golem.”

John Dee himself appears in The Science of Discworld II: the Globe, where he hosts wizards visiting from Discworld. In Elizabethan London, Dee lived at Mortlake, which is also a location in Ankh-Morpork.

Page 221 (US 244)

In Formal Golem, Flead first says, "You make eternity bearable!" and then asks "Why do you care about golems? They have no passionate parts!" A visual key to the Enochian alphabet can be found here where you can try the translations yourself.

Page 262 (US 293)

Moist initially makes the same mistake as William de Worde, and assumes that just because Nobby Nobbs requires proof of species, he's the "Watch Werewolf".

Page 268 (US 299-300)

Mr Fusspot's courtship of Angua von Überwald is reminiscent of the battery-powered dog toys beloved of British shopping centres, which yap, somersault and repeat, although none of them come with the "new toy" delicately described by Captain Carrot as "a wind-up clockwork item of an intimate nature".

Page 333

“Tell us the secret, Mr Lipwig.” Vetinari is putting subtle pressure on Moist to explain the secret of the Umnian golems. "Tell us" could refer to the fact Adora Belle also wants to know. However. In Freemasonry, a higher-level Initiation involves the candidate being symbolically tortured by pitiless creatures who continually demand "Tell us the secret!" If the Candidate withstands the torture, his tormentors turn to the Grand Master and regretfully say things like "I vexed his inner soul and spirit most greatly, Master, but he remained mute." To which the Master shakes his head regretfully, and orders the candidate to be killed and buried. Who is then interred in a closed coffin and left to stew for a few hours. After which he is symbolically reborn into the Light as a higher-level Mason and a new person... Killed and resurrected - offered an Angel, perhaps? (Robert Anton Wilson uses this as a theme in one of the Illuminatus! fantasy novels.)

Specific annotations lacking page numbers

• The Lavishes are distinctly reminiscent of the Borgias. The same extended family, devious infighting, and desire for political power. The most famous Borgia dynasty includes Cesare and Lucrezia "Lucci" Borgia, mirrored here as Cosmo Lavish and Pucci Lavish, although an alternate source for the name of Cosmo would be Cosimo de Medici, the first of the Medici to become ruler (Patrician?) of Florence.

Incidentally, Pucci is also the name of another influential family from Florence, political allies to the Medici family, particularly Cosimo. Possibly such references to other members (or allies) of the Medici family exist among the Lavishes.

• In The Truth, Mr. Tuttle Scrope is put up as the replacement Patrician for Vetinari. He runs a shop that sells leatherwork and "rubber work...and feathers...and whips...and...little jiggly things" and was, presumably, the supplier for Sir Joshua Lavish in Making Money, who had the cabinet full of such supplies.

• Moist's plan to sell the gold of the bank mirrors the actions of Gordon Brown, who sold 400 tons of Gold Bullion between 1999 and 2002. His comments on gold have been a recurring theme in the Discworld books, ever since the Colour of Magic.

• Brown's predecessor, John Major, was an accountant and son of a trapeze artist; he has been described as "the only man to run away from the circus to become an accountant."

• Moist mentions that his family in Uberwald belong to a religion which he describes as the "plain potato church." There is also an "Ancient and Orthodox" potato church -- could this be related to Mr Tulip's religion in The Truth? Both men originally come from an unspecified place in Far Uberwald and Mr Tulip mentions that his religion goes back hundreds of years... is it possible that Moist comes from the same village or one nearby?

Famous Quotes

There are a number of famous quotes, particularly on the subject of confidence games, alluded to in the book. I'm not sure if these qualify as annotations but there are a lot of them so we can put them all together & if you like, skip this bit.

p. 58 (Harper Paperback)

"Fooling all of the people all of the time" The phrase is "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time," variously attributed to Abraham Lincoln or PT Barnum, among others

p.60 (Harper Paperback)

"sell the sizzle" ...not the steak, coined by American salesman Elmer Wheeler

p.62 (Harper Paperback)

"Someone who can prove they don't need the money?" Bob Hope, "A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it."