Thursday Next



Thursday Next lives in an Alternate History. In her world, Time Travel, cloning, and genetic engineering are commonplace; resurrected dodos are the household pet of choice. The obscenely powerful Goliath Corporation, which nearly singlehandedly reconstructed England after World War II, now runs the country as a virtual police state. And literature, particularly classic literature, is very, very, very Serious Business. Writers are revered with nearly spiritual devotion, controversial claims about books and authors can be criminal, and an entire police squad, the LiteraTecs, exist to keep the literary scene in order. Thursday works for just such a unit in Swindon, with her friend and colleague, the exceedingly polite Bowden Cable.

In an effort to rescue her mad inventor uncle Mycroft from international arch-criminal Acheron Hades, a gleefully-evil genius with supernatural powers, Thursday discovers the Great Library, a fully self-contained world that exists within the pages of all works of literature, where all literary characters live. They're self-aware, acting out their roles when a person reads a book but chilling out and living their own lives as soon as they close it. the Great Library is governed by the Council of Genres and kept in line by Jurisfiction, another police force whose task it is to make sure the plot of every book stays the same every time someone reads it.

Such is the universe of Jasper Fforde's meta-fictional masterpiece, the Thursday Next series. The author hangs a lampshade on everything and anything relating to classic literature, the tropes of police fiction and spy fiction, and even the relationship between a work of fiction and its audience. Heavy on wordplay and puns, the series deals with the tireless heroine's adventures balancing her work as an agent of Jurisfiction in the Great Library and LiteraTec in the outside world, to say nothing of her responsibilities as a wife and mother.

The books in order are:

 * The Eyre Affair
 * Lost in a Good Book
 * The Well of Lost Plots
 * Something Rotten
 * First Among Sequels
 * One of Our Thursdays is Missing
 * The Woman Who Died a Lot

In addition, there is an Un Installment known as The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco between the fourth and fifth/sixth books, which is implied to have happened but does not exist.

The books play with post modern ideas, and toy with the fourth wall, noting how things are written, or their own style. It plays up literary tropes, and their difference with the world. Fictional characters tend to be Genre Savvy, but accepting of the issue. A lot of the action takes place in the Bookworld, where stories are assembled and regulated from behind the scenes, leading to various oddities.

Jasper Fforde has also written the Nursery Crime series, which employs many of the same ideas and has a similar style. (The connection between the series is explained in great detail in The Well of Lost Plots.) In this world, Genre Savvy detectives try to deal with suspicious goings-on, often involving Nursery Rhyme characters while trying to be both efficient and readable. This is a world where it's customary for Da Chief to suspend a detective at least once a case, and detectives gain credibility for having novel cars, lost loves, and drinking habits.

This series contains examples of:
"Audience: WHEN is the winter of our discontent!?
 * Action Mom: Thursday, in the later books.
 * Adaptation Decay: Meta-examples abound, with the film version of Thursday's exploits bombing and her in-universe book adaptations flanderising her one way or the other.
 * Ambiguously Human: The fictional characters, notably
 * : In First Among Sequels with Thursday in regards to Jenny.
 * Androids and Detectives: Written!Thursday and Sprockett in Missing.
 * Anvil On Head: The Eyre Affair pays homage to the anvil tradition in the subplot involving the Minotaur who has been tagged with a slapstick marker.
 * Arson Murder and Jaywalking: The twenty-second subbasement of the Well of Lost Plots is described as "a haven for cutthroats, bounty hunters, murderers, thieves, cheats, shape-shifters, scene-stealers, brigands, and plagiarists.
 * although in-universe, given the nature of the Well, plagiarism is at least as bad as theft. And cheating.
 * Also, Acheron Hades enjoys slow murder, torture, and flower arranging.
 * Audience Participation: In-universe, the audience at the performance of Richard III behaves very much like ours at Rocky Horror.

Richard III: Now is the winter of our discontent [audience cheers] made glorious summer by this son of York [audience don sunglasses]..."

"Let's be careful out there."
 * Backdoor Pilot: The Well Of Lost Plots spends a lot of time in the novel that is eventually turned into The Big Over Easy, the first book of Fforde's second series (and actually his first novel).
 * Badass Normal: Thursday.
 * Bad Dreams
 * Balancing Deaths Books
 * Black Market Produce: Characters from the BookWorld want things from the Outland (the real world), and those things include foodstuffs. In response to requests and along with other non-food items, Thursday brings back a jar of Marmite, Moggilicious cat food (for The Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire), and Mintolas (for Marianne Dashwood, who describes them as, "A bit like like Munchies but minty").
 * In the Outland itself, partly due to the tight borders England has with the Socialist Republic of Wales and partly due to an exorbitant tax to pay for the Crimean War, cheese has become expensive enough for a black market for the stuff to become profitable, under the Cheese Mafia. Then again, considering the cheeses you can get...
 * Blessed Are the Cheesemakers: There's cheese so strong it can be used as a weapon, and needs to be encased in lead.
 * Blondes Are Evil: both have blond hair.
 * Bluenose Bowdlerizer: A hated terrorist group in the Book World, responsible for the destruction of half of the writings of Chaucer. Then again, what they do is basically the equivalent of assault or murder.
 * Book Within A Book: Obviously, but particularly notable in that the book in which Thursday lives in The Well Of Lost Plots, after much tinkering on her part in that story, was eventually published itself as The Big Over Easy.
 * In First Among Sequels, it gets even more complex. The first four books exist within the context of the story, but as much Darker and Edgier versions of the "real" events (i.e. what happened in the books that exist in our world), while another book in the fictional series, The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco, never existed in the real series. I warned you that it was complicated.
 * It doesn't get any simpler in One of Our Thursdays is Missing.
 * Brainy Brunette: Thursday.
 * Her daughter Tuesday could be too; although we don't know her hair color, she certainly has the 'brainy' part down.
 * Call a Rabbit A Smeerp: Several fictional elements are obvious counterparts to real-world ones - for example, in the sixth book, "getting hyphenated" is tantamount to getting drunk, and "metaphor" is a precious commodity akin to gold.
 * CamelCase: So much of it that it's surprising it doesn't get lampshaded. There's the OutWorld & the BookWorld, SpecOps has the LiteraTecs and the ChronoGuard, and so on.
 * Catchphrase: A remarkably subtle and somewhat heartwarming version that's never pointed out in the text. When the top secret gathering of elite fictional agents in Bookworld breaks up, does the Bellman utter a bloodthirsty battle cry? No, he always warns his people--

""...crimes against humanity, murder, theft, illegal possession of a firearm, the discharge of a weapon in a public place, murder, impersonating a SpecOps officer, cheese smuggling, assorted motoring offenses and murder.""
 * Character Development: Two blank "Generic" characters come to stay with Thursday in The Well of Lost Plots. By the end, they're both fully formed characters.
 * Chekhov's Gun: A number of seemingly unimportant items thrown out early on in the book come back at crucial moments, such as:
 * The Well Of Lost Plots: Thursday is given, but it's still in her pocket when she needs a distraction later.
 * More like Chekhov's long range sniper rifle: in the first book, a minor villain is named Yorrick, in the fourth book, Hamlet is pulled from his namesake play and Yorrick is brought back as a main character.
 * For once with a literal gun, though also a Chekhov's Scene: In the first book, Thursday has a brief, odd experience with time travel where she sees herself in trouble. She hides a gun for herself to find when that scene finally plays out in Something Rotten.
 * And a Chekhovs bullet in the first book.
 * The  turns out to have crucial importance in First Among Sequels.
 * The slapstick marker used for tracing "bookrunners" in Something Rotten.
 * The Trans-Genre Taxi in First Among Sequels
 * Child Prodigy:
 * Cliff Hanger: in First Among Sequels, where in the final chapter we find out that
 * Clockwork Creature: Delta-5 automata, such as Sprockett, in Missing -- complete with Wind Up Key, though apparently the new model Delta-6's are self-winding. This is apparently the cutting edge of Bookworld robots: perhaps Ridiculously Human Robots are quite literally confined to the Sci Fi Ghetto.
 * Cobweb of Disuse: Thursday mentions the cobwebs at Satis House when she goes there to meet Miss Havisham.
 * Coincidence Magnet: Thursday herself, who saves the day both in the real world and BookWorld several times, despite being just another LiteraTec and Jurisfiction agent, respectively. Interestingly, a villain has this as a consciously-controlled power, the ability to manipulate probability. Said villain attempts to kill Thursday numerous times with staggeringly unlikely coincidences.
 * Corrupted Data: The Mispeling Vyrus. It's a virus in the Book World that causes things to misspell, turning a parrot into a carrot, the floor into flour and other unpleasant consequences. This sounds more amusing than dangerous until you realize it can turn your bones into boons, your nose into a noose or your hands into hats, depending on the severity of the infection. In short, if your body is infected, you are most likely going to die unless you get help really quickly. It can only be contained by dictionaries.
 * Crossover: An incredibly subtle one-- Thursday talks to Tempe Brennan about an attempt on her life during a reading of "Grave Secrets", a few books later in her own series (Bones to Ashes) Tempe reads an unnamed Jasper Fforde novel in an airport.
 * Cultural Translation: Most of the obscurely British cultural references are changed or explained in the American version, but Landen's name wasn't caught. "Landen Parke-Laine" was supposed to be a Meaningful Name, but Americans don't get that it's a Monopoly reference, as the U.S. version of the game calls that space Park Place.
 * North Americans who wound up with the British edition can consult the annotations on Fforde's website: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good book, and The Well of Lost Plots.
 * Day of the Week Name: Thursday, her mother Wednesday, and her children Tuesday and Friday.
 * Department of Redundancy Department: In ''One of Our Thursdays is Missing'.

"The trip back downriver was uneventful and over in only twelve words."
 * Dirty Coward
 * Drama Preserving Handicap: DNA technology exists in the BookWorld - of course it does, people have written about it - but it's legally prohibited anywhere outside of the Forensic Drama genre, because it would ruin the mystery in any other genre.
 * Dream Weaver
 * Drives Like Crazy: Miss Havisham.
 * Also Mr. Toad.
 * Duet Bonding: Thursday and Landen
 * Due to The Dead
 * Early Installment Weirdness: The Eyre Affair sees Thursday enter Jane Eyre, but it's not until the second book that Thursday enters the BookWorld and things really kick off.
 * Encyclopedia Exposita: The Jurisfiction Guide to the Great Library by the Unitary Authority of Warrington (formely know as Cheshire) Cat.
 * Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas:
 * Evil Twin :
 * Extranormal Institute: Jurisfiction.
 * The Faceless: The Great Panjandrum has no appearance of its own, as everyone viewing it sees what they expect to see (usually, something that looks very much like themselves).
 * Famed in Story
 * Family Theme Naming: Nearly everyone in the Next family is named after the days of the week. The one exception is Jenny, because
 * Fanwork Ban: Subverted! In book six Thursday visits the island of fanfiction, and is surprised to find it a lively place that celebrates their source material. While the locations and character are described as flat, this is stated to be a side-effect of being copied, with varying degrees of severity depending on the quality of the writer. Plus it tangentially references Thursday and the Doctor fighting Daleks. Excuse me, I have some writing to do...
 * Although Fforde personally does not like fan-fiction, which a few commentators found slightly hypocritical as the entire book series can be considered a classical fiction fanfic.
 * Fire Forged Friends
 * Flat Character :
 * And of course there are the Generics, sort of apprentice characters who need to undergo Character Development before they're good enough to be used as main characters.
 * Foe Yay: The closest thing Acheron Hades has to a friend is one of his cohorts, who he likes so much that . The relevant portion to this trope is that
 * Footnote Fever: The footnoterphone.
 * Furry Fandom: May be indicated by the fact that Commander Bradshaw is married to an intelligent anthropomorphic gorilla. (Although, supposedly, this fact would have escaped everyone who actually read Bradshaw's books.)
 * Genius Bonus: Some of the literary allusions can be quite obscure,
 * Genre Busting: So very, very much.
 * Gilligan Cut: At the end of chapter twenty-five of The Eyre Affair, Victor states that there is no way on God's own earth that Thursday and Bowden are going to get him to pose as an Earthcrosser. Guess what he's doing at the beginning of chapter twenty-six?
 * Giving Up On Logic
 * Gratuitous English: Subverted in story when a series of seemingly random English words on Japanese T-shirts turn out to be part of a code message.
 * Great White Hunter: Commander Trafford Bradshaw is a safari adventurer from a series of boys' adventure novels.
 * Green Aesop: The Short Now, caused by convenience in working with natural resources over responsible planning, depleting them, all the while claiming that there is not enough proof that the problem may be man made instead of natural - let's just say it bears some resemblance to political topics of the day. Similarily, the Stupidity Surplus.
 * Grilling the Newbie: Thursday gets grilled by many characters in the unpublished book Caversham Heights (where she's hiding out from Goliath and Lavosier during her advancing pregnancy) when they find out she's an Outlander. Some of them don't believe she is an Outlander when she admits not knowing things (like "the purpose of alphabet soup"), so she has them leave off their speech descriptors and successfully identifies several speakers in order.
 * Half Human Hybrid: Explicitly averted in Book World, no less.
 * Happily Married: Thursday and Landen, eventually.
 * Hide Your Children: Jenny, for good reason.
 * Hilarity Sues: The rules of international croquet are so vague and full of loopholes that as well as a team of players, each teams fields a team of lawyers (complete with substitutes) who constantly try to bend the rules their way.
 * Houseboat Hero: Well, House-Seaplane Hero, in The Well Of Lost Plots.
 * I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin: Thursday's cheese-smuggling activities.
 * Innocent Swearing: Two-year-old Friday Next in Something Rotten learns naughty words (notably "bum", "bubbies", "arse" and "pikestaff" rendered in an Old English font) from St. Zvlkx. Thursday speaks as if she isn't certain what he said the first time he uses them, but the second time she tells her son, "If those are rude Old English words, St. Zvlkx is in a lot of trouble--and so are you, my little fellow."
 * In Spite of a Nail: When Landen gets removed from the timeline, the only detectable change beyond his absence is the literal wallpaper and curtains.
 * I Should Write a Book About This: Played with. By First Among Sequels, Thursday's even meeting the results of doing so.
 * It Was a Gift
 * It Will Never Catch On: Extreme example - while the Next-verse contains things we would consider impossible, such as the Gravitube through the centre of the Earth, but when Thursday is introduced to the idea of mass aeroplane transit and moon landings, she considers that impossible.
 * I Want Grandkids
 * Kangaroo Court: Thursday was put on trial for changing the plot of Jane Eyre, which occured in Kafka's The Trial and the trial of the Knave of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. Also subverted in that she managed to out-Kafka the judge and prosecution (having read the book beforehand) and got the prosecutor arrested instead.
 * Lampshade Hanging: Plenty throughout, but especially:
 * In Well of Lost Plots, a character is responsible for clearing up narrative mistakes or "bloopholes". One example he gives is an author writing, "the daffodils bloomed in Summer", a mistake Fforde makes in The Eyre Affair. He then says that he is working on a method of covering which involves saying, "Hi, I'm a hole, try not to think about it," both invoking the MST3K Mantra, and hanging a Lampshade on Lampshade Hanging itself. It really doesn't get more meta than that.
 * Sometimes there's a scene where Thursday, looking for some department in the BookWorld, opens the wrong door and finds two people acting out an old joke (or something like that.) When it happens in First Among Sequels she says to herself "I keep doing that. They should label these doors better."
 * Laser Guided Amnesia: One of the powers of mnemonomorphs like Aornis Hades, she can also plant memories and set up specific mental blocks so that the victim can't recall certain information, even when they are reminded of it.
 * The Law of Conservation of Detail: Double Subverted in Something Rotten, when a runaway steamroller almost kills Hamlet and Thursday while they're in the OutWorld. Thursday points that, unlike in books, sometimes things like that have no meaning and certainly will not turn out to be vitally important at the end of the story. Then it turns out - at the end of the story -.
 * Thursday notes that the nice thing about living in BookWorld is that the little annoyances in real life is generally avoided, the car never needs refueling and the toilet paper never runs out. But there is also a profound lack of breakfast, wallpaper and smells.
 * The Library of Babel: The Great Library.
 * Lighthouse Point: Where Thursday faces off against a psychic enemy, except that it is in her mind.
 * Like Reality Unless Noted: Averted, indeed almost inverted. Every time geopolitics is mentioned, for instance, it sounds radically different to that of our world (Russia is Tsarist, one of the two biggest superpowers is based in Africa, Wales has left the United Kingdom - no word on Scotland) and things like Britain being invaded and occupied by the Nazis during WW 2 are casually mentioned out of hand.
 * Literary Agent Hypothesis: The entire setup of the series seems to suggest this, especially the article in Well of Lost Plots that casually mentions that characters fool the author into believing that he or she is writing the story, whereas in reality their role is minimal. Chapters often open with quotes from Thursday and others, written long after the fact. Although it's also subverted - in First Among Sequels, Thursday needs to visit her previous books, so she goes to the sixth floor of the great library, where all the "F" authors are stored...
 * Mad Scientist / Bungling Inventor: Thursday's Uncle Mycroft comes up with countless ingenious, insane and downright impossible contraptions, many running on Nonsensoleum such as a doorway into fictional worlds, a brain screensaver, and an early warning sarcasm detector.
 * Magic Librarian: The Cheshire Cat
 * The Medic
 * Medium Awareness: The characters in novels act as if they are actors in a film, most of them only maintain character when the book is being read and the camera is on them, so to speak.
 * Mentor Occupational Hazard:
 * Mega Corp: The Goliath Corporation, which pretty much owns Britain.
 * Metafictional devices: Because so much of the plot revolves around dealing with events inside books and with fictional characters, nearly all devices get used to some extent, especially Trapped in TV Land, Refugee From TV Land, and Medium Awareness.
 * Misaimed Fandom: An in-universe meta-example, with the author of the Emperor Zhark books having written them as a parody of the science fiction genre but now has a dedicated and unwanted fandom. He plans to kill off Zhark in the last book to spite them, but doesn't reckon on Zhark himself showing up from the BookWorld to give him a talking to.
 * More Hero Than Thou
 * Names to Run Away From Really Fast: The Eyre Affair's villain, Acheron Hades, and his siblings (all of whom are also named after mythological Hellish rivers - Styx, Phlegethon, Aornis and so on).
 * No Name Given: Thursday's father. Also Granny Next, for good reason:
 * No One Gets Left Behind
 * Noodle Incident: Books are extremely malleable and any unexpected stress will cause the plotline to change. And once a change establishes itself, it will cause every copy of that book across all of time and space to change along with it and we will never know what the original story was about.
 * One Steve Limit: The Echolocators are responsible for weeding out accidental repetition from texts, they are also on the lookout of identically named characters. Apparently, they once wiped out an entire Hemmingway novel because all seven of the books characters share the same name.
 * Once A Book: Thursday will have to help Spike Stoker out with a magical or supernatural mission, usually completely unrelated to the rest of the story - in fact Fforde once described the Spike segments as 'a breather' in the pell-mell plot. . In the sixth book, Spike appears briefly, but there is no mission. And it's only a brief flashback in Well.
 * Only a Flesh Wound: Averted. In The Eyre Affair, Thursday is shot in her gun arm. She notes to the tribunal that she knew she couldn't aim with that arm anymore, and has only seconds before she loses enough blood to make her incapable of aiming entirely, despite moving the gun to her good arm.
 * Our Dragons Are Different
 * Painting the Fourth Wall: Used extensively. Characters can communicate between different novels, or from novels to the real world, using footnotes. There is a mispeling vyrus which affects not only the characters burt teh narateev tetx itlesf. Fonts are treated as languages. And so on.

"'Wait', I cried out.
 * The most elaborate use of this comes when Emperor Zhark drops in on Thursday in the Outworld, which she describes in a paragraph about ninety words long, ending in a chapter break. The next chapter is titled "Emperor Zhark" and during their discussion, Zhark says he's negotiated a new contract in the BookWorld that means he has to get two chapter-ending appearances per book, at least eighty words of description for his first appearance and one chapter bearing his name. When he leaves, he's fulfilled all those conditions in the book you're reading, except the second chapter-ending appearance. Then he pops back in for a recipe, ending the chapter again.
 * Also when Thursday and Landen get together after some break, they're ready for sex, but:

'What?'

'I can't concentrate with all these people-'

Landen looked round the empty bedroom. 'What people?'

'Those people,' I repeated, waving a hand in the general direction of everywhere, 'the ones reading us.'"

"Mycroft: Please! You're Upsetting The Wor'ms! They're Starting to hy-phe-nate!"
 * In One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing, the fictional Thursday talks to a man on the bus about what they'd like to experience in the Outworld, and thinks that she didn't mention the most important thing: a sense of unscripted free will, as even when she's not in her books, she feels that someone is always watching her and reading her thoughts.
 * Planet Eris: To name but one small example, at the beginning of Lost in a Good Book, a "Pampas Grass Vigilante Squad", which an SO-32 agent is charged to stop ("Pampas grass might well be an eyesore, but there's nothing illegal in it."), is mentioned, and this is by far a tame example.
 * Planet of Steves: Many people have changed their names to those of famous classical writers, leading to them having a number subscript indicating which, for example, Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe they are. No main characters have this sort of name, but it's still part of the setting.
 * Political Correctness Gone Mad
 * Portal Books
 * Prophetic Name / Punny Name / Red Shirt: In Lost in a Good Book, Thursday is "protected" by pairs of government agents with names like Kannon and Phodder, Deadman and Walken, etc...they don't last long.
 * Subverted in that the last of these pairs (Slaughter and Lamb) turns out to be so inept that the Big Bad is willing to ignore them so long as they don't make any progress in the investigation. Thursday in fact suggests this to them, telling them that they don't stand a chance; it's subtly hinted that she may be doing so because of their names.
 * A more meta-example: Thursday's Uncle Mycroft is clearly named after Sherlock Holmes' even more intelligent brother Mycroft...then, later in the series, Uncle Mycroft goes into hiding in the Bookworld in a Sherlock Holmes story and becomes Mycroft Holmes.
 * There is Thursday's husband, Landen Parke-Laine, his parents Billden Parke-Laine and Houson Parke-Laine (Park Lane is the second most expensive property on UK Monopoly.
 * Punctuation Shaker: What happens if you upset the Book Worms

"“Why is everyone so flat?” I asked.
 * Punny Name: Apart from established fictional characters, it's doubtful there's anyone out there who doesn't have one, and he's a Public Domain Character. The Squire of the High Potternews, the villainous Jack Schitt (with half-brother Brik Schitt-Hause and ) and Landen Parke-Laine (with parents Houson and Billden) seem top offenders.
 * Though Jack Schitt is a pseudonym given to him by Thursday, as it turns out in One of Our Thursdays Is Missing.
 * Reality Is Unrealistic: After The Eyre Affair, Thursday's look becomes the in thing "How can I not have the Thursday Next look? I am Thursday Next!" (So says Thursday after being featured in a pop magazine and inspiring a new fashion trend.)
 * Redemption Equals Death: in Something Rotten . In First Among Sequels.
 * Renowned Selective Mentor: Miss Havisham trains Thursday for Jurisfiction in Lost in a Good Book. She's specifically described by Mrs. Dashwood as being highly selective, and she herself says as much, warning Thursday that she could easily lose the privilege of studying with her.
 * Ret Gone: Thursday's husband Landen gets temporarily eradicated - not just killed but written out of history - plus the nonexistent relatives of the attendees at Eradications Anonymous meetings.
 * Thursday's father was eradicated, but managed to still exist because of his ChronoGuard skills. However, he no longer has/never had a first name.
 * And in the fifth book, time travel itself becomes retgone, because it never will be discovered.
 * Ridiculously Average Guy: The generics, the characters in every story that have no personality whatsoever. Every character starts like this.
 * Ripple Effect Proof Memory: Thursday remembers Landen after he is eradicated, and is still pregnant by him. It's a sign that Friday is going to be big in the ChronoGuard.
 * River of Insanity
 * Rubber Band History - An interesting variant - though it isn't set in our world, thanks to Time Travel, it will be once the ChronoGuard sort out all the errors.
 * Said Bookism: Bookworlders are capable of forgetting who is currently speaking in a conversation if it goes without dialogue tags for too long. Thursday impresses a few of them by knowing who is talking without them.
 * Serious Business: Works of classic literature. To the extent that a world revolving around a children's card game makes perfect sense in comparison. (Fforde says in interviews that the people in the Thursday Next world have the same mass devotion for literature that people in our world have for sport.)
 * Sport? Sport and religion combined, maybe. Bear in mind sports fans don't go door to door evangelising their favourite athletes. (Have you ever wondered how Shakespeare wrote all those wonderful plays?)
 * Yet... in Well of Lost Plots the Bellman says that only 30% of the Outland reads fiction on a regular basis.
 * They do play and watch one sport, however, with fan clubs and world cup tournaments and all. Namely croquet.
 * Art is also Serious Business. The first book contains a riot over artistic styles and SpecOps-24 deals exclusively with art crime.
 * Cheese is Serious Business as well, though it's occasionally justified when certain cheeses can knock out a human at ten feet, or even require evacuation if their rubbersealed metal containers come unsealed.
 * She Who Must Not Be Seen: Jenny, Thursday's youngest daughter. The recurrent scenes that Thursday always shows up at precisely the wrong time and miss seeing her is played as a rather weak Running Gag,
 * Shout Out: Frequently.
 * In Lost in a Good Book, Spike has a powerful vacuum cleaner used to suck up ghosts. He also uses it for his household chores, and says that there's no bag, and therefore no loss of suction. He is quoting, almost word for word, the description of the Dyson line of vacuums, started by inventor James Dyson in the mid-80s. The vacuum in the book, which is set in the mid-80s, was invented by James in R&D.
 * So Proud of You
 * Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Subverted in Lost in a Good Book, where a demon hunter has captured countless beings, all believing themselves to be the ultimate incarnation of Evil on earth.
 * Later, we find that all of those beings are kept in jars in the same room and argue about who is the supremest Supreme Evil Being.
 * Stable Time Loop: At least one is established in The Eyre Affair, in which . There are others.
 * Talk About the Weather
 * Talking in Your Dreams
 * Take That: Fforde sometimes slips in a few of those. Like the subplot about a bellicose general convincing the other members of the Council of Genres to invade Racy Novel, a rogue genre member of the Axis of Unreadability, after presenting sketchy intelligence about its development of a dirty bomb of gratuitous sexual content.
 * Tear Your Face Off: Acheron Hades took the face from his dying Mook Felix and applied it to a succession of abducted and brainwashed replacements. He later threatened to make Thursday the next Felix.
 * Theme Naming: Thursday's mother is named Wednesday and two of her children are called Friday and Tuesday.
 * There Are No Coincidences
 * They Do
 * This Is Reality: Thursday repeatedly mentions this to Booklanders in the real world, though frequently events hint that her world isn't real either.
 * Time Travel Tropes: Thursday's unnamed father is a rogue Chronoguard agent, causing parodoxes left right and centre, and changing time in whatever way seems suitable. Time Stands Still whenever he visits. Time in the Next series is obviously one big Timey Wimey Ball. However, in the fifth book,
 * Lampshaded in the fifth book when Landen talks about the headaches involved in writing about time travel in science fiction, and gives the advice to future authors planning to: "Don't".
 * Timey Wimey Ball: Both Thursday's father and her grandmother respond to her confusion over time travel paradoxes by saying "Oh, Thursday. Don't be so linear."
 * Granny Next
 * Thursday has seen, but continues to interact with him on different points of his timestream.
 * Even though, many traces are still left behind. For example, a car buried in prehistoric strata, carrying in the glove box a newspaper from the day after its discovery, which announces the discovery of the car.
 * Actually,
 * Also consider the way books are written/constructed and the relation between the Outworld and Bookworld. Who exactly is coming up with the narrative? (The first books were supposed to be Thursday's recollections, and the chapter-heading quotes would often be comments from her.)
 * Unicorn
 * Un Installment: The 'also in this series' page at the start of First Among Sequels mentions an unavailable book in between Something Rotten and itself, The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco. The reason why this is the case is revealed towards the end of the book itself:.
 * Also Chapter 13 is missing from each book. (And in the Nursery Crime series). It's listed in the contents with a chapter title and fake page reference, but the chapter itself isn't there.
 * The Un Reveal: Often justified thanks to Painting the Fourth Wall. For instance, in One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing, Thursday is able to escape an inescapable death trap simply by later explaining in broad strokes how she escaped. Apparently, it was very clever.
 * A Villain Named Zrg: Emperor Zhark is the villain of his own pulpy sci-fi series, but in the metafictional main story, he's one of the good guys.
 * Weapons That Suck: Spike's special vacuum cleaner. Designed to suck up SEBs (Supreme Evil Beings), which Spike deals with on a near-weekly basis.
 * Welcome to The Real World: At the end of Lost in a Good Book, Thursday is offered the chance to hide in an Alternate Universe which sounds suspiciously similar to ours, but she rejects the option.
 * In the sixth book,
 * What Do You Mean Its Not Heinous: Hades' little brother tries to follow in his Complete Monster footsteps. He does things like calling to make appointments to look at people's used cars, and never showing up.
 * Played with by Hades and his henchman Mr. Delamare, who is required to perform one wicked act a day. One day, this act is driving at 73 miles per hour.
 * When Mr. Delamare was given the opportunity to have the English government give into any demand he makes, he has.
 * White Sheep: Lethe Hades, according to First Among Sequels.
 * Who You Gonna Call: Spike Stoker!
 * Winds of Destiny Change: One of the superpowers of Aornis Hades is her ability to cause deadly coincidences.
 * Would Not Shoot a Civilian
 * Writer On Board: Several parts of First Among Sequels. Jasper Fforde is well-known for being opposed to Fan Fiction, so FAS goes on a half-page detour explaining how The Lord of the Rings is being irreparably damaged by fanfiction writers.
 * Which is pretty ironic considering the Thursday Next series is about fifty percent crossover fanfiction.
 * Even more ironic because the character in question is talking about how more people reading the book damages it (the character's job is to perform maintanance on books as they suffer routine wear and tear from being read). That's right, don't write fan fiction, it causes more people to read the original work.
 * The extra "wear" isn't from more readers, but the closer trawling for detail to better establish and collate the Canon, which SF and Fantasy fans do more than other genres.
 * But if you wear one out too much, you have to get a new copy, which authors should love.
 * In the sixth book, we actually get to see the Fanfiction area of the Bookworld - and it's as clever as you'd think.

“It’s a natural consequence of being borrowed from somewhere else,” explained the Thursday, who was, I noted, less than half an inch thick but apparently normal in every other way. “It doesn’t make us any less real or lacking in quality. But being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.”"


 * Your Worst Nightmare
 * Zeppelins From Another World