Motto: Omnis Qvis Corvscat Est Or. Coat of arms: a shield quartered with, on the upper-right and lower-left quarters, guttées d'or on a field, azure. On the lower-right and upper-left quarters, a creuset, sable et enflamm on a field, gules.

The Guildhall, located on the Street of Alchemists in Ankh-Morpork, is always new. It was explosively demolished and rebuilt for times over one two-year period - on the last occasion without a lecture and demonstration room, in the hope that this might prove helpful to its long-term prospects.

This tiny, despised Guild largely devotes itself to the aid of widows and orphans of those alchemists who had taken an overly relaxed attitude to potassium cyanide or who had distilled the juice of some interesting fungi and had drunk the result. There are in fact not very many widows and orphans, because alchemists find it difficult to relate to people long enough to form such relationships, and women often find it difficult to grow attached to people who have laminated themselves across the ceiling.

Alchemists are uncooperative in every other respect; every alchemist is a solitary individual, working in darkened rooms or hidden cellars and endlessly searching for the one longed-for breakthrough - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of Life - or, failing that, enormous amounts of cash. This success has never been achieved, but they have succeeded in creating celluloid and popcorn (or, as they styled them, octocellulose and banged grains - the basis for the brief Discworld moving-picture industry centred around Holy Wood) and have managed to fail to discover nuclear power, computers and electricity. The only real skill that alchemists have developed is how to turn gold into less gold.

They tend to be thin, pink-eyed men, with vague, unworldly expression that you get from spending too much time in the presence of mercury.* They also tend to be nervous individuals - it comes from not knowing what the crucible they are experimenting with is going to do next.

The current head of the Guild is Thomas Silverfish, although in the nature of things there is a regular turnover - and, indeed, rise and fall - of senior Guild members.