Publisher
At the start of the series, the Guide was published by Megadodo Publications, one of the "great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor." When Megadodo was bought out by Infinidim Enterprises in Mostly Harmless, the new editor in chief, Vann Harl, changed the Guide's demographic from penniless hitchhikers to families in billions of billions of alternate worlds, thus altering the Guide's original purpose. When Ford learned of this plan, he knocked out Vann Harl and stole his Ident-I-Eze card to increase the spending limit on Ford's own Dine-O-Charge card. Ford was thus able to use his Dine-O-Charge to buy (among other things): a pink spaceship, all the foie gras in London, and The London Zoo, in addition to buying the hotel he was staying at for the concierge, all charged to the Guide and Infinidim Enterprises.
Read more about this topic: The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (fictional)
Famous quotes containing the word publisher:
“No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide.... I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“A publisher is a specialised form of bank or building society, catering for customers who cannot cope with life and are therefore forced to write about it.”
—Colin Haycraft (b. 1929)