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I think the first Pratchett book I ever read was Only You Can Save Mankind. It was also the first book of his that I bought – eventually. I was living in South Africa at the time and a new bookshop had recently opened – the first and, I suspect, only science fiction and fantasy bookshop to ever open in a country better known for Apartheid and Nadine Gordimer. South African fiction is predominantly about Apartheid – two of the classics in the field are Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton and A Dry, White Season by André Brink – although I do own a curious volume I once found in a second-hand shop in Cape Town, which is possibly the only example of science fiction from over there – a utopian novel set on the moon and written by an Afrikaans judge of the supreme court back in the sixties…

But I do digress. I used to go to the bookshop – it was called Fantamania, and I should really talk about it some more at some stage – on Saturdays, and mainly browse. I didn’t have much money for books – my parents were complaining about the ones already in the house – so when I discovered Only You Can Save Mankind, I did the only thing I could think of – I read it, piece by piece, at the shop.

It was the kind of shop where they let you do that, which might explain why it went out of business. Every week I would come back and the book would still be there, and I’d read another chapter. Eventually, of course, I bought it – it was a Doubleday hardcover, second printing, but I still have it.

After that, I bought the books new, in paperback, one at a time, until I had a pretty exhaustive collection of reading copies. I sold them at last on my recent visit to South Africa – they paid for a steak dinner for me and my brother, which is one of the things I love most about books – the way you can sometimes convert them into food, thus proving beyond doubt their contribution to physical well-being.

My true Pratchett collecting only began once I came to the UK. Pratchett is one of those writers with immense patience for his fans, resulting in fairly frequent book signings, which are an experience in themselves. I went to my first signing at the old Forbidden Planet on New Oxford Street (the shop had since moved and lost in the process much of its charm, but that’s a subject for another week). I queued for – four? Five hours? In the queue were old people, and young people, and visible crazy people, and there were girls dressed like witches walking around advertising a theatre adaptation of Carpe Jugulum, which I actually – and to this day I don’t know what possessed me, besides the fact that it was fairly close to where I lived – went to. I still have the tickets, alongside the signed copy of the book.

On that day I bought, and had signed, first edition copies of Carpe Jugulum, The Last Continent and one other book, I’ve forgotten which one. They’re not particularly valuable, of course. Once Pratchett’s print runs hit the millions, values drop accordingly. Still, over the next few years I bought each new book in hardcover, and eventually had it signed.

I’m not sure when my true Pratchett collection started. Perhaps it started in Fantasy Centre, the greatest SF bookshop in Europe, which sits opposite a porn shop on the Holloway Road and which deserves a column, at least, all of its own. At that time, I found a first edition of Equal Rites, which is the third Discworld novel, and highly collectible. It was, as far as I could see, at least Near Fine – collectors’ term for absolutely lovely, really – and I got it for £25, which was a bargain even then. Then there was the general second-hand bookshop in Richmond-upon-Thames, where I found a copy of Sourcery – the fourth Discworld book – for £7.50… Suddenly I had a viable collection. “Think,” I said to my girlfriend, “what would happen if I put these on Ebay!”

“You’ll never put them on Ebay,” she said.

“They’re my emergency fund,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said.

Ebay was responsible for me getting my hands on Eric, the fabulously hard-to-find hardcover first edition, which is a Discworld short story illustrated by Josh Kirby. It’s a beautiful book, and I got it – and a couple of other early first editions – from a guy on Ebay who wasn’t sure what they were but, since they were in hardcover, wanted £7.50 each for them. I took a gamble and, despite a couple of book club editions, scored well.

I never had much love for the middle books, where the cover illustration is truncated for some reason: I find them unattractive. Therefore, I had a good selection of the books from Carpe Jugulum or so on, and a decent selection of early titles – Eric, Sourcery, Equal Rites, Guards! Guards! (that one from the same Ebay guy who gave me Eric) but none in the middle.

Eventually, I did have to use my ‘emergency fund’, and I didn’t let them go cheap. But I did have to let them go – a plane ticket and a new horizon were beckoning, not to mention my credit card company – and so now my old friends are gone. I have something to compensate for it though, a story of my own – I was once mistaken for Terry Pratchett.

This happened a few years ago. I was a guest at a massive French festival – an SF convention is a more appropriate term, perhaps, but there you go – partly on the basis of winning a short story competition that year that was organised by the European Space Agency. It was the kind of festival that had a lot of money to spare, since, besides myself (surely, the star attraction) it had less well-known guests (Brian Aldiss and Tim Powers were only two of them) – oh, and a bloke in a hat called Terry Pratchett.

At the time I had long dreadlocks, which contrasted, I felt, quite sharply with Pratchett’s own bold, bald appearance. I shaved my own hair recently – now I just look like my dad. In any case, on the second or third day of the convention I was asked to do an interview for a German television programme (Don’t ask me why. They wanted to know what I thought the future would look like. The right thing to say would have been that I’m sure the future would get on with or without my opinion. What I did in fact say was, “Wow, yeah, fantastic! Um, are you sure you got the right guy?”)

The interview was done in the bar area, where I was filmed going in circles around a weird sculpture-thing, waving my hands and saying things like, “You know, going to space would be really, like, awesome!” to round it off; however, the two pleasant gentlemen from German satellite TV suggested a new approach.

“Ve vant you to tell our viewers vat your story is about!” one of them said.

“Vat do you say if ve put red light under him, and a blue light directly at him–”

“Like a Doppler shift!”

“Ja! And zen he can tell ze camera what ze story is about in thirty words.”

I said, “Um.”

They took me into a room. We couldn’t figure out how to switch off the lights. Finally one of the organisers showed up and pointed out the switch. Everyone was politely embarrassed. I had lights pointed at me, and lights under me, and we did about thirty takes that went something like:

“It’s about a rock going through space–”

“More passion!”

“It’s about this rock and it’s intelligent and it’s going through space!”

“Look into ze camera!”

“It’s about this intelligent rock and it’s seeding the solar system with other self-replicating nodes in a massive solar system wide communication network aaaarrrrggggh!”

“Again!”

It reminds me of the joke: how many Germans does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Shut up! Ve are asking ze questions here!

No, really, they were very nice. I never watched the interview (Stephen Baxter was another interviewee, and I dread to think what they did to him). It’s probably best I never saw it.

When I came out of the interview room, a diffident young man approached me. He had a badge identifying him as one of the organisers, and a bulging white envelope in his hands which, imagination claims now, must have been stuffed full of hundred Euro notes. “Excusez-moi?” he said. “Are you Terry Pratchett?”

I stared at him in disbelief. I was hot, I hadn’t eaten all day, and here was some crazy Frenchman thinking I was Terry Pratchett. Of course, I felt an overwhelming impulse to say yes.

“Um, no,” I said. “You’re looking for a bloke in a hat, bald, with a beard, you know?”

“Oh, I am so sorry,” he said. “Merci. Au revoir.” And off he went.

A half-hour later I ran into Pratchett by the escalators. “Some guy was looking for you,” I said, “and he thought I was you, which is really stretching credibility to the limit!”

Pratchett took one look at me from beneath his wide-brimmed hat, and said, “Yes, he managed to insult both of us in the same sentence!”

Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. This is his web site. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. Lavie’s website is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk/.

In 2007, Apex Publications released a collection of Jewish adventure stories titled HebrewPunk from Lavie Tidhar. This book is available as a direct order from the Apex Store and from the Apex aStore.