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Article of the day

The Streets of Ankh-Morpork was the first of the Discworld Mapp series, and features an atlas of the city of Ankh-Morpork, the rich, powerful, and sprawling city in the Discworld series.

The map was devised by Stephen Briggs, who compiled references from the Discworld novels, and revised it many times with test readers' help. Terry Pratchett also checked the many revisions of the map, and was very surprised at how well the city fitted together. In the accompanying booklet he said that he thought Ankh-Morpork was unmappable, as he'd made it up as he went along, but that he then realised that real cities are also made up as people go along. Pratchett later revised his above opinion, saying that a fantasy world should not be mapped until it has become established in the creator's mind. He had expected a map to restrict future ideas, but found instead that it inspired them.

The final, artwork-grade map was drawn by Stephen Player, who also drew the artwork for a later publication, The Discworld Mapp. The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, an aerial-view map of the city of Ankh-Morpork, looks vaguely like a brown and green cut onion with a river bisecting it. An enclosed booklet includes Pratchett's and Briggs's words on how they devised this map, and a 6-page map legend listing the many famous and picturesque establishments in Ankh-Morpork.