William de Worde is the black sheep of an influential Ankh-Morpork family, scraping out a humble lifestyle as a common scribe producing stock letters-to-home and a gossipy newsletter for foreign notables. This arrangement is soon undermined by the arrival of a team of dwarves to Ankh-Morpork who intend to start a printing business using moveable type, a technology hitherto outlawed in the city in favour of engraving due to the unpredictable consequences of its use in producing magical texts. De Worde and the dwarves establish The Ankh-Morpork Times later employing Sacharissa Cripslock and Otto, a black-ribbon vampire and iconographer. The Guild of Engravers, antagonised by the unauthorised efforts of the Times, cuts off their paper supplies and establishes The Ankh-Morpork Inquirer, a loss-making tabloid filled with popular fabricated stories, often about unlikely events in far-off countries.

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