I'm thinking of blowing a significant amount of cash to overcome my resistance to buying DW-themed books not totally written by Pterry, so I'd love to get your opinions (or anything you know) about the following:
Turtle Recall. I have the Discworld Companion that covers the main novels through Thief of Time. Does this version repeat what's in the older one but with additional entries to cover the books written since then? Or has a lot of revision been done?
Yes, and no. There's been a number of revisions to the companion, but Turtle Recall is the most recent. To be honest, it may be better waiting - Stephen Briggs was working on another revision (last year, at least), but there's been no announcement about when that will be published (or even if it will be - they may have cancelled it). He did say, at the time, that the intention was for this next version to include *all* entries - even ones dropped from earlier revisions that don't appear in Turtle Recall. So, it may be worth just waiting a year or so for this to be published.
(I have at least 3, if not 4 versions of the Discworld Companion as I kept buying each as they were released).
The Compleat Discworld Atlas: This looks really cool, but is there a lot of writing to accompany the maps and illustration? A book of maps alone without commentary isn't worth it to me.
Oh yes, this is definitely worth it (as is The Compleat Ankh-Morpork). Both contain giant, two sided poster-maps, which are wonderful, and there is a *lot* in the companion booklet - it's more of a book, actually. Lots of extra information about the city/world, going into a lot of detail about each of the regions, some new and wonderful lavish illustrations. Certainly not a disappointment.
The Ankh Morpork Archives: It looks like only volume 1 will be available in the U.S. but you UKers wll get Volume 2 I guess. From what I've read, it collects a lot of information from the existing Diaries, none of which I have. On the other hand, it looks like the DW Companion I have repurposes some of the Guild description stuff written in other diaries, so do you think I'd just be getting the same content in a different format?
Volume 2 isn't published just yet - it's coming out in October (UK publication date, US should probably follow - or just order it from a UK store or The Book Depository, or even the Discworld Emporium/Discworld.com)
The contents of the Ankh-Morpork Archives are the same as the diaries that they originally came from - it's just organised slightly better, some of the art is larger than it was in the diaries, and there's a few extra quotes about the content from Stephen Briggs and Paul Kidby at the start of each section. If you already have the diaries, and don't want to justify the expense, then you can probably skip it - there's no new textual content. But if you didn't manage to collect the diaries in the late 90s and early 00's, then this will give you that content in a lovely format.
I bought volume 1 despite owning all the diaries... *except* the 1998 UU diary, so I wanted that content. That being said, I've also pre-ordered volume 2 because I like the format, even though I know I will have seen all the content before, and can pull the diaries off my shelf to read it again if I wanted to.
....
To be honest, I've found *all* the Discworld spin-off material to be very worthwhile, with the possible exception of Dodger's Guide to London (yes, technically not Discworld), which didn't inspire me nearly as much. Mrs Bradshaw's Handbook is great, The World of Poo is a delightful little story told about some new, and some side characters of Ankh-Morpork, and Where's My Cow is a delightful picture book. The Science of Discworld books are fascinating (and do contain a few more stories about the wizards, as written by Terry), the Companion(s) are a decent reference book, with some extra jokes thrown in, and Nanny Ogg's Cookbook is a riot. The Folklore of Discworld is fascinating, but doesn't contain any extra stuff written by Terry - it's possibly another you could skip - it just looks at elements of Discworld and how they tie into Roundworld folklore.