Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [44]
The earliest origins of the Guide are now, along with most of its financial records, lost in the mists of time.
For other, and more curious, theories about where they are lost, see below.
Most of the surviving stories, however, speak of a founding editor called Hurling Frootmig.
Hurling Frootmig, it is said, founded the Guide, established its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and went bust.
There followed many years of penury and heart-searching during which he consulted friends, sat in darkened rooms in illegal states of mind, thought about this and that, fooled about with weights, and then, after a chance encounter with the Holy Lunching Friars of Voondoon, who claimed that just as lunch was at the center of man’s temporal day, and man’s temporal day could be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so lunch should be (a) seen as the center of man’s spiritual life, and (b) held in jolly nice restaurants, he refounded the Guide, laid down its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and where you could stuff them both, and led the Guide on to its first major commercial success.
He also started to develop and explore the role of the editorial lunch break that was subsequently to play such a crucial part in the Guide’s history, since it meant that most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing.
Shortly after this, the Guide was taken over by Megadodo Publications of Ursa Minor Beta, thus putting the whole thing on a very sound financial footing, and allowing the fourth editor, Lig Lury, Jr., to embark on lunch breaks of such breathtaking scope that even the efforts of recent editors who started undertaking sponsored lunch breaks for charity seem like mere sandwiches in comparison.
In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship—he merely left his office late one morning, and has never returned since. Though well over a century has now passed, many members of the Guide staff still retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a sandwich and will yet return to put in a solid afternoon’s work.
Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury, Jr., have therefore been designated acting editors, and Lig’s desk is still preserved the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign that says LIG LURY, JR., EDITOR, MISSING, PRESUMED FED.
Some very scurrilous and subversive sources hint at the idea that Lig actually perished in the Guide’s first extraordinary experiments in alternative bookkeeping. Very little is known of this, and less still said. Anyone who even notices, let alone calls attention to the curious, but utterly coincidental and meaningless fact that every world on which the Guide has ever set up an accounting department has shortly afterward perished in warfare or some natural disaster, is liable to get sued to smithereens.
It is an interesting though utterly unrelated fact that the two or three days prior to the demolition of the planet Earth to make way for a new hyperspace bypass saw a dramatic upsurge in the number of UFO sightings there, not only above Lord’s Cricket Ground in St. John’s Wood, London, but also above Glastonbury in Somerset.
Glastonbury had long been associated with myths of ancient kings, witchcraft and wart curing, and had now been selected as the site of the Guide’s new financial records office, and indeed, ten years worth of financial records were transferred to a magic hill just outside the city mere hours before the Vogons arrived.
None of these facts, however strange or inexplicable, is as strange or inexplicable as the rules of the game of Brockian Ultra Cricket, as played in the higher dimensions. A full set of rules is so massively complicated that the only time they were all bound together in a single volume they underwent gravitational collapse and became a Black Hole.
A brief summary, however,