Henry Bemis Books: Towel Day is Monday, May 25: Send us a snap of you and your towel

Two weeks after author Douglas Adams died, on May 11, 2001, somebody proposed remembering the Author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with an annual Towel Day.

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If you haven’t read The Guide, DON’T PANIC. Just order the fine edition Henry Bemis Books has on sale:

Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Short Story (Gramercy Books, 1st ed. 1st printing, 2005). ISBN 0-517-22695-2. Leather bound with gilt titling, the last word in the misadventures of Arthur Dent. Very good condition. HBB price: $85.

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If, as we rather suspect, you are feeling tightfisted and not at all inclined to support booksellers in their end of the month financial slump, then this excerpt- from Chapter 3 of The Guide- explains why towels are important:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Towel Day is an Official Henry Bemis Holiday. This means an Annual Observance. This year, being only three months in business and rather broke, we start modestly, with an invite: send us a snap of you- solo- or with your buds- with your towel. We’ll post the ones that won’t get us landed in Blogger Jail, and we’ll send you the Enormous Summer Catalogue so you can buy something! (Send them to henrybemisbookseller@gmail.com, if you please).

HBB’s Book Guy, Lindsay, has been an Adams Addict for nearly forty years, having been one of those lucky froods who heard the very first broadcast of The Hitchhuiker’s Guide on BBC Radio 4 in 1978 (who knew that behind that glacial manner beats the heart of a scifi geek? These are the sorts of things one learns in the Henry Bemis Confraternity).

And here, for your delectation, are two links to short interviews Adams gave before his untimely 2001 death, at the age of only 49.