Haven't forgotten my towel since 1980!
The Favorite Thing Ever site just put up an entry on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and now I feel like I gotta get a Kindle. I never felt that way before, but I'm sold.
Pan Books published the novel as a paperback in October 1979 after the BBC turned it down, and it sold 250,000 in the first three months.
January of 1980, I was browsing the shelves in the Science Fiction Bookshop in Manhattan after class, looking for some light SciFi, preferably humor--and said as much to the guy who ran the shop. He was at the front desk, cutting open a box. He popped open the top and pulled out a paperback: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "How's this?" he said. "The guy from the distributor said it was pretty funny."
I bought that paperback, and yeah, it was "pretty funny." It wasn't easy reading it on the D train back to Brooklyn, people kept giving me looks as I tried to stifle my laughter, completely unsuccessfully. And it occurs to me that, barring tourists who brought it back with them on the plane, there's a slim possibility I'm the first person in the USA who read HHGG. ;)
Pan Books published the novel as a paperback in October 1979 after the BBC turned it down, and it sold 250,000 in the first three months.
January of 1980, I was browsing the shelves in the Science Fiction Bookshop in Manhattan after class, looking for some light SciFi, preferably humor--and said as much to the guy who ran the shop. He was at the front desk, cutting open a box. He popped open the top and pulled out a paperback: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "How's this?" he said. "The guy from the distributor said it was pretty funny."
I bought that paperback, and yeah, it was "pretty funny." It wasn't easy reading it on the D train back to Brooklyn, people kept giving me looks as I tried to stifle my laughter, completely unsuccessfully. And it occurs to me that, barring tourists who brought it back with them on the plane, there's a slim possibility I'm the first person in the USA who read HHGG. ;)