Last year, for our inaugural Towel Day here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, it made sense to share the book series from whence came the Towel Day name, with a post about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

First held in 2001, two weeks after Adams’ death, Towel Day is now celebrated every year on May 25 as a tribute to Adams.

But as much as I love HHGTTG, to honour Adams this year I thought I’d shout out his lesser known Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

It’s possible that Dirk Gently has had even more of a direct impact on my life than HHGTTG. For one thing, it taught me that sometimes it’s worth pushing through a weird book that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at first because it really pays off at the end. And I mean right at the end.

And by “a weird book” I now kind of mean a weird anything… in other words, the larger lesson was that curiosity is rewarded, sometimes in unexpected ways.

I also identified with our holistic detective, Dirk Gently, in a way I never did with any of the central characters in HHGTTG. The whole “holistic” approach to life resonated. And as a shout out from me to book-adjacent media, I have to mention the spin off BBC Television series inspired by these books that – in keeping with the HHGTTG spirit of no version of the work being ever quite the same thing – introduced a brand new character in Bart Curlish, a holistic assassin, whose similarly holistic approach to life had wholly different results. But again it resonated… just the holistic part, not the assassin part.

My resulting renewed interest in the books and brief obsession with the show (unfortunately series 2 didn’t hold up quite as well) all culminated in a conversation up in RATT, the undergrad bar at my alma mater, in which I asked the question “well what am I a holistic blank of?” After a pause, my friend’s eyes went wide and she shouted “I KNOW! YOU’RE A HOLISTIC LIBRARIAN.”

And now I’m back in school working towards my MLIS.

In pulling out the books again to write this post, I ended up having Adams bestow upon me yet another lesson, a reminder to know your own worth and be willing to assert it. In all these years, I’d never read the back cover closely.

Yeah, I’m going to overstate the obvious here… he wrote his own cover blurb!

So have a “thumping good” Towel Day and happy reading!

– Winston