The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel) productions in the late 1970s. Davies himself appears as Prosser. This edition is out of print – Adams bought up many remainder copies and sold them, autographed, on his website. There have been three audiobook recordings of the novel. The first was an abridged edition (), recorded in the mid-1980s by Stephen Moore, best known for playing the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android in the radio series, LP adaptations and in the TV series. In 1990, Adams himself recorded an unabridged edition for Dove Audiobooks (), later re-released by New Millennium Audio () in the United States and available
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on making the alien a roving researcher for a "wholly remarkable book" named "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". As the first radio episode's writing progressed, the "Guide" became the centre of his story, and he decided to focus the series on it, with the destruction of Earth being the only hold-over. Adams claimed that the title came from a 1971 incident while he was hitchhiking around Europe as a young man with a copy of the "Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe" book: while lying drunk in a field near Innsbruck with a copy of the book and looking up at