quoted from 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.

a book about the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", "not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.

In fact, it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - of which no Earthman had ever heard either.

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words, "DON'T PANIC" inscribed in large, friendly letters on it's cover."

"The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jadlan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoonb; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it around your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assume that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course, dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly , a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag; nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possessions of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit, etc, etc,. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend he hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally lost. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, and through it all and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slag, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Sulriel? There's a frood who really knows where her towel is!" (Sass: know, be aware of, have sex with; Hoopy: really together guy; frood; really, amazingly together guy)"