1. The Great Library takes the concept of the universal library (a repository of all knowledge) to its ultimate extreme. How did this concept develop as you created the Nextian universe, and how did you decide that a library was the natural setting for not only the storage of books but their creation as well?

2: The giveaway TNU055 reveals that the famous Trinity College long room is the model for the physical arrangement of the Great Library. What is it about the layout of the long room that inspired you, and have you had any particularly memorable experiences in libraries that have influenced your writing?

3: The Well of Lost Plots is a particularly vivid world within the world of the Great Library. Are there elements of libraries you have visited that inspired such a feeling of vastness?

4: How did you decide to make the Cheshire Cat the Librarian of the Great Library? Does he have certain qualities that seem, well, "librarianish" to you?

5: Your work as a writer encompasses not only your published works, but also the giveaways and web pages that supplement your books. Do you have a complete collection of all of the materials (including all of the web pages) that you have created for the TN books? Is it conceivable that anyone else could amass a similar collection? If a library were attempting to comprehensively collect your work, would you consider it important for them to preserve your website as well? (The issue of collecting and preserving electronic and internet resources is a big issue in libraries at the moment, as evidenced by recent efforts at the British Library to extend the legal deposit requirement to include non-print resources, such as websites).

6: The Well of Lost Plots is a particularly vivid setting within The Great Library where the raw materials of novels are stored as they are formed into texts. The Well lies within the twenty-six sub-basement levels of The Great Library and features shops and storefronts selling plot devices, characters, and grammatical situations. Where did the inspiration for The Well come from? Do you feel as though libraries as a whole operate as a sort of Well of Lost Plots, where the collective identity of a culture is not only preserved but renewed as well? In essence, does the concept of The Well of Lost Plots reveal your thoughts on the role libraries play in society?











1. The Great Library takes the concept of the universal library (a repository of all knowledge) to its ultimate extreme. How did this concept develop as you created the Nextian universe, and how did you decide that a library was the natural setting for not only the storage of books but their creation as well?

It's all about metaphors, really. But first, a little history: Eager to set a standard, the UK Metaphor Association agreed in 1926 that the river should be the standard measure of metaphorical power, thus giving us a "RivMet" value from which we can gauge all other metaphors. On the RivMet scale the Congo in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" would be close to metasaturation at 96 RivMets, although not all rivers are so blessed: the river in "The Lady of Shallot" gains only 71 RivMets and the Thames in "Three Men in a Boat" barely 26. Bridges rank around 60 RivMets depending on context, as do towers, multinational corporations, forests, mountains, oceans, the Titanic, the Apollo Moon project, decapitation - in fact, almost everything has a potential RivMet value that far exceeds their own literal meaning. Libraries, you will be unsurprised to hear, enjoy a far higher metaphorical rating than all other public buildings. Even a musty-smelling Carnegie will never fall below 68 RivMets. There is something unbelievably special and valuable about collected knowledge. Something that transcends mortality. Walk into a library eager to confirm a fact and you are confronted with the undeniable feeling that you are not alone in wanting to know more. Thousands of humans who are now dust did exactly the same before you. Libraries are a metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge, the thirst for innovation. Libraries are the physical projection and result of something we have that sets us apart and makes us do extraordinary things: An inquiring mind.

2: The giveaway TNU055 reveals that the famous Trinity College long room is the model for the physical arrangement of the Great Library. What is it about the layout of the long room that inspired you, and have you had any particularly memorable experiences in libraries that have influenced your writing?

The Trinity College Long Room is the library from which all other libraries should be judged. Not for content, of course, because much of the knowledge stored in the Long Room itself is either obsolete or grindingly dull. What makes Trinity special is the feeling you get when you visit. Individual features are not enough on their own - Trinity ticks all the boxes.

Part of a great seat of learning ... tick
Imposing shelving with ladders on rails ... tick
Dusty tomes, leather bindings, long and intractable titles ... tick
Windows with the blinds drawn ... tick
Dark heavy wood ... tick
Still in use (Scholar's feeding time: 11:00 AM and 5:00 PM) ... tick
Lots of books ... tick
Paper-suited conservators speaking in hushed tones ... tick
Serried ranks of marble busts depicting distinguished dead white guys ... tick

It's the last feature that adds a certain drama to the proceedings. The unseeing eyes stare at you as you walk past, adding a sombre and mortal note to the library. The Long Room is not somewhere to laugh out loud or have improper thoughts. This is a serious no-shit learning deal. You're not even allowed to take pictures. The genuine article in form, function and feeling. Whenever I am in Dublin I have to go there - my Dad was a "Book of Kells" groupie so you can take a decko at that before pausing to think deep thoughts about nothing to yourself in the long room - then go to the gift shop downstairs and buy a postcard or a Guiness-themed pen or something. Oh, and if you're in Dublin, do drop into the national museum for its Celtic treasures and then the art gallery for Caravagggio's "The taking of Christ in the garden of Gethsamene" It's very good. Am I answering these questions or just waxing? I think the truth is that I just love all this weird human stuff we get up to, and libraries have lots of stuff about stuff. I have a small upwardly-mobile collection of books that hopes one day to be a library. It's not really big enough and doesn't have a copy of Mathmatica Principia, or Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World but we all have to start somewhere.

3: The Well of Lost Plots is a particularly vivid world within the world of the Great Library. Are there elements of libraries you have visited that inspired such a feeling of vastness?

As you can see above, Trinity was the model for The Great Library (note capitals) but the reading room in the British Museum is equally impressive although strictly speaking a bit daft - who had the bright idea of using a dome as a library? (It was the unlikely named Sydney Smirke, that's who.) Actually, the dome isn't really the library at all - it's the reading room - but any reading room or library that is less than 3% book does seems a lot like wasted space to me, hence Fforde's Third Dictum which states: "A building is worthless as a library if you can hover a Jet ranger helicopter inside it". However, the opposite is true of railway stations where the more Jet rangers you can hover within it, the better it is. Where was I? Ah yes. The Great Library. I like the high ceiling idea and the ornateness but I wanted to make the Library really, really, big - so gave it hundreds of miles of corridors, twenty-six floors above ground for published novels and twenty-six sub-basements where novels are created - the "Well of Lost Plots". I also think it has a large entry lobby where you can hover a Jetranger or two, plenty of polished brass, marble - and ornate lifts that look like they've been pinched from the Waldorf-Astoria. In fact, the Library has a little bit of all the great public buildings I have ever been into, from the Museum at Cardiff to the Buenos Aires Post Office to St Paul's Cathedral in London. There is something awe-inspiring by these sort of large scale building projects. A metaphor for teamwork, perhaps. By the way, if anyone is interested in seeing if your local library conforms to Fforde's Third Dictum, a Bell Jetranger's rotor disc is 33.3 ft wide.

4: How did you decide to make the Cheshire Cat the Librarian of the Great Library? Does he have certain qualities that seem, well, "librarianish" to you?

The Cheshire Cat has a certain 'nonsequitous' quality that makes him suitable for almost anything. His continued presence in my books is a constant reminder of the huge debt we all owe to Lewis Carroll who should be made the Patron Saint of Nonsense. I don't think there is anything necessarily 'Librarian' about the Cheshire Cat - I was recruiting, and he happened to be at the head of the queue.

5: Your work as a writer encompasses not only your published works, but also the giveaways and web pages that supplement your books. Do you have a complete collection of all of the materials (including all of the web pages) that you have created for the TN books? Is it conceivable that anyone else could amass a similar collection? If a library were attempting to comprehensively collect your work, would you consider it important for them to preserve your website as well? (The issue of collecting and preserving electronic and internet resources is a big issue in libraries at the moment, as evidenced by recent efforts at the British Library to extend the legal deposit requirement to include non-print resources, such as websites).

Yes, I have created a lot of extra stuff to make my books spill out into the real world - I kind of like the idea that you can fuzz the edge of make-believe and reality. This Nextian ephemera ranges from downloadable entroposcopes to "Swindon Library" bookplates (With 'consign to furnace' stamped on them), from T-shirts to "Advelopes" to a series of postcards that I give away with signed copies. I'm a keen archivist so have an example of most things; I understand there is a collector in the States who claims to have a complete set of postcards, and someone in the UK who is not far behind. Libraries collecting examples of all my work? Well, If for one moment we suspend the usual rules of literary worth and label me an "artist" rather than an "well-meaning clot" which is more how I see myself, then a collection of all the junk that I have created might be important as academic interest in books is mostly about mode/reason of creation and much of my ephemera is nothing more than Fforde's very own Research and Development facility. If I'm toying with an idea there's nothing better than to create a Dodo trader's website or a chocolate-covered spanner or something. It's my version of artist's notebooks. Pity the poor student in 2068 being forced to write a dissertation on my work. (Fforde's work and his place within new wave nonsense. Discuss.)

6: The Well of Lost Plots is a particularly vivid setting within The Great Library where the raw materials of novels are stored as they are formed into texts. The Well lies within the twenty-six sub-basement levels of The Great Library and features shops and storefronts selling plot devices, characters, and grammatical situations. Where did the inspiration for The Well come from? Do you feel as though libraries as a whole operate as a sort of Well of Lost Plots, where the collective identity of a culture is not only preserved but renewed as well? In essence, does the concept of The Well of Lost Plots reveal your thoughts on the role libraries play in society?

To be perfectly honest, I wasn't thinking about the role libraries played in society when I came up with the 'Great Library' concept, and at the time I wasn't consciously aware of any deep hidden ideas and comments at all - writing novels is much more hit and miss with me. (academics might use the word 'organic' to describe how a book grows but I think it's really closer to 'fungal' - a bit like that strange mould that grows on refrigerator seals overnight). Ideas come into my head and if I like them, they are used, if not, I pass. Making the depository of all known stories into a library is not a huge leap - I never thought it could logically be anything else. The 'Well of Lost Plots' I wasn't sure about. What would the place where all books are created look like? In the end I thought it should mirror the staidness of the library upstairs; a library that has had all the rules, regulations and quiet orderliness stripped away from it - a mixture of a Dickensian London street, a bustling far-Eastern market and some post-apocalyptic world where law and order has broken down - and in this way I suppose I am commenting on the rare freedom writers afford themselves. In writing fiction the limit is really your own imagination; you can do what you want as long as it fits within the long- established conventions of story-telling. Writing for me is pretty much as you see it in the Well: A chaotic fiction factory.

Questions set by Greg Prickman

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