h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I recently got the American-published "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide", a rather lovely leather-bound edition with all five novels & the short story about Zaphod in his youth. Lovely!

I've been reading it extra-closely to keep an eye out for the inevitable little differences between it & the UK version.
I got to the bit in the first book where, having been told all about Deep Thought & the Ultimate Question, Arthur is reunited with the others for a meal & a chat with the mice.

Something leapt out at me as being very odd indeed...

It said:
"'Well,' said Zaphod, attacking a boneful of grilled muscle, 'our guests here have been gassing us and zapping our minds...'"

Guests? Surely, I thought, that should be hosts, especially as Arthur responds, 'Hosts? What hosts?'

I grabbed the UK edition (Trilogy Of Four, published 2005*), and was rather startled to find it said the exact same thing.
I checked the paperback edition I bought way back in 1981, there it was again! Guests, not hosts. The 1995 American paperback, yup. Even the movie tie-in edition from a couple of years ago says it!

Given how often the book must have been reformatted & typeset for various editions on both sides of the Atlantic, it amazed me that this has gone largely unnoticed. It also amazes me that, having read this book so many times over the last 28 years, I didn't notice this anomaly till two days ago!

I think this is probably because, being so familiar with the dialogue from the tv & radio versions, this tends to play in my head when I'm reading, so a little glitch like this is overlooked.

Another thing I wonder about is where this anomaly came from in the first place. Was it a typesetting error during intitial publication, or was it part of the original manuscript? Seems unlikely to be a simple typo as the two words aren't very similar, and are, if you think about it, opposite sides of the coin.

So, dig out your copy of The Guide, take another look, and if you hadn't spotted it either, happy boggling!


*Curiously enough, the omnibus edition "A Trilogy In Five Parts", first published by Heinemann in 1995 does say 'hosts'.

I sometimes wonder what editors actually get paid for... just think of the myriad of spelling errors and just plane wrong words in the newspapers,... Mind the worse ever thing I saw was a total spell check put in wrong word, in the title* of a scientific peer reviewed paper, in a very* prestigious scientific journal... The entire article would make no sense whatsoever if you took the title of the paper to be correct

Update:
This weekend, I downloaded the iPhone app version of this novel...
The error is STILL there!

I find this oddly comforting

I probably oughta be worried that I'm geeky enough to find that reassuring too

Update to the update:

The Kindle edition retains this oddity.

That is all.

You'd think someone might have noticed it by now in one* of the editions

I'm wondering if it's a mistake they're choosing to leave in place to protect the integrity of Douglas's work.
Having said that, if integrity was such a big deal we wouldn't have had "And Another Thing..."*.

*I should point out that I recently climbed off my high horse & read it. The book, not the horse - who reads horses? It isn't a bad book, although some of the puns are really cheesy, but it's just not...right.