I love Douglas Adams. I first heard the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio on the air in Syracuse New York way back in...1980? It looks like it hits the States then, and that's when the second series - which was part of that broadcast - was completed. At the time, I taped the episodes off the air (holding the same old Panasonic Recorder that taped Quark off TV up to the radio). I later replaced those with BBC released tapes, and finally CDs off of Amazon.com. Hitchhiker's, if you're not familiar, created a wonderful, rich, funny universe in which fantastic, powerful alien races were often hampered by the same little details that make everyday living here on Earth such a bother.
Hitchhiker's of course became a book series, and a TV show, and a movie - but the radio show is the truest best form to me. Anything Adams did was great to read and I recommend it all - but one of his lesser-known works, I believe, is the Meaning of Liff. If that sounds vaguely familiar to you, you may be remembering the opening titles of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life - where "Liff" is engraved in stone until a lightning bolt corrects it. Basically, the book came about from Adams and his friends drinking in a pub and making up definitions for place names that were perfectly good words going to waste just hanging around on street signs. One of my favorites was "kentucky: (adv.) Fitting exactly and satisfying. The cardboard box that slides neatly into an exact space in a garage, or the last book that fills the bookshelf, is said to fit 'real nice and kentucky'."
I don't recall where I got the original, British print little black book I have, which is odd. I've always had a pretty good memory for where I came across anything I collect. It may have been in a bookstore in Ithaca NY in my collecge years, or it may have been at the Boston SF convention I attended in 1986 (my first time out of New York State, not counting Canada). The Deeper Meaning of Liff, though, I know I found at the Citadel outlet center in Los Angeles - a rather run of the mill outlet behind an amazing facade evoking a Babylonian temple that was, I believe, a tire factory before or right after WWII. (Link: http://www.laavenue.com/citadel.htm). Deeper Meaning has more definitions inside, but there's something about that well-worn little black book that fits my memory of Hitchhiker's and all Adams work, well, real nice and kentucky.
Liff, by the way?
(n.)A book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words. 'This book will change your life'.
