DIRK GENTLY'S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY

Uncorrected proof copy of the first edition, first printing. Original beige card with titles printed in black to the upper cover. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, with some light creasing to the spine and bottom-right corner of the front cover, and a little rubbing to the extremities. The contents, with page 113/4 remaining untrimmed and just a couple of minor marks to the fore-edge of the closed text block, are otherwise clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps. Rare in proof state.

Described by its author as 'the first ever fully realised Ghost - Horror - Detective - Whodunit - Time - Travel - Romantic - Musical - Comedy Epic'. The plot resulted from a reworking of Adams' ideas he'd had while writing two 'Doctor Who' episodes with Graham Williams, 'City of Death' (1979) and 'Shada' (1980). Yet, despite Adams' having the core story elements so close to-hand, the author still struggled to complete the novel and its sequel within the deadline set by the publisher, with just one full sentence to show for over a year's work and a combined advance of over two million pounds: "High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse", which later became the opening line of the second chapter. Ultimately, with the help of editor Sue Freestone, the incessant musical accompaniment of Johann Sebastian Bach's 'Schubler Chorale Number Five', and Adams' typesetting the book himself on his personal Macintosh, the first 'Dirk Gently' book was finished and submitted as a camera-ready manuscript just two to three weeks after the deadline. Adams would later be famously quoted as saying "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by". Known for repeating his own anecdotes, he would also go on to tirelessly recount the technical details of typesetting his own work in the author's note preceding the text and across many interviews (Simpson, 2003). A couple of differences between the proof and the published version have since been identified, namely the removal of the following short sentences from the bottom of chapter three, page six (page eight of the first edition), "She flipped channels again. Another news. All bad. That was it. That was enough." Various grammatical errors were also later amended from chapter four page 24 of the proof (page 26 of the first edition), including turning the following sentence into a question "Will you please let them see it, Daddy", and shifting the placement of a stray comma from "The don, took it and turned it over [...]" to "The don took it, and turned it over [...]". References: 'Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams' by M. J. Simpson (2003).