Haven't forgotten my towel since 1980!
Apr. 23rd, 2011 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gozerThe 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. ;)
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Date: 2011-04-25 01:19 am (UTC)We were all desperate for the book to come out! I know of at least one person who specifically got a copy from England -- I think her dad had to travel for business, and she begged him to bring her one.
I didn't get a chance to read it myself until the summer of 1981. I was reading it when I met Pfeffa, actually! He'd read it already, and that conversation led to decades and decades of wedded bliss. No, really!
In short, Yay!Hithchhiker's Guide!