Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

For Polly

An Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition

An Introduction
to the Introduction
to the New Edition

This Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition is a highly significant one in the history of Introductions. Its presence on these pages means that this book has achieved the World Record for the Number of Introductions in a Book of This Nature. With the addition of this Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition, The Salmon of Doubt can now claim to have no less than three Introductions, one Prologue, and one Editor’s Note. That is two Introductions more than Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and one Introduction, one Prologue, and one Editor’s Note more than The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Even the Oxford English Dictionary can only boast one Preface, one Historical Introduction, one General Explanations, and a List of Abbreviations—that’s two Introductions short of The Salmon of Doubt.

You are, without doubt, holding in your hands one of the best-introduced books in the English language. We hope you enjoy the Introduction to the New Edition that follows this Introduction to it and continue to read on even into the book itself.

—Terry Jones
FEBRUARY 2, 2003

Introduction to the New Edition

Introduction to the
New Edition

Hi! I hope you enjoyed that Introduction to this Introduction to the New Edition. I know that some of you may think it unimportant that Douglas’s final volume should have the distinction of a World Record of this sort. But, as a friend, I often felt that Douglas was sadly shortchanged in the matter of Introductions. I could never pick up Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, with its Note on Dickens by Angus Calder, its handsome twenty-three-page Introduction, its Note on the Text, and, finally, its Suggested Further Reading, without recalling sadly Douglas’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which could boast neither Preface, Foreword, nor Introduction. It was the same with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, and Mostly Harmless. It is true that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish has a Prologue, but on inspection that turns out to be all part of the book and not an Introduction at all. Even Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency aspires to only an Author’s Note, and even that, I believe, Douglas had to write himself! Indeed the overall lack of Introductions has reduced the majority of Douglas’s work to the level of such poorly introduced books as T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, and The Gospel According to St. Matthew—none of which have any preamble of any kind whatsoever.