Dirk Gently - For Your Consideration - Episode 7 

I had occasion to talk to Douglas Adams's secretary on the telephone at some point, and I said to her that my favorite urban legend was that, supposedly, urban legends are all started by Douglas Adams and his friends sitting around in a pub talking loudly and seeing how long it takes for what they say to spread around the world. (I forget where I first heard or read that.) She said "Douglas will find that funny! I'll talk to him and see how he responds". And of course then he died before I got an answer. So here's another story with a better ending: One time I had a few books for Neil Gaiman to sign and he asked me who to inscribe them to. I honestly didn't know, because I was going to give them as gifts and I didn't know who was going to get which yet, so I said "Could you just toss in some sort of quip along with your signature?" He did so, and one of the books was "Neverwhere" in which he quipped "Mind the gap!" I hadn't read the book or seen the miniseries yet, so I had no idea what that meant, and as I was walking away holding the book open and wondering what "Mind the gap!" could possibly mean, the glue popped loose from the binding and the middle third of the pages plopped out onto the floor -- leaving me staring at a massive gap in the middle of the book!

There are two books that I originally failed to understand and disliked, that I later re-read and better understood and then loved. The first was Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and the second was The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. In both cases I was just too young on first reading (30 years ago) to grok some important references to books I hadn't yet read. As much as I love Douglas Adams I have to rank him the second greatest British sci-fi humorist author after the duo "Grant Naylor". With both of them the books were far superior to any other medium.