Sounds similar to this account...
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited
book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors
like a good idea at the time.
One of these (the one Arthur now came across) supposedly relates
the experiences of one Veet Voojagig, a quiet young student at
the University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic
career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and
the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, and then,
after a night of drinking Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with
Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with the problem
of what had happened to all the biros he'd bought over the past
few years.
There followed a long period of painstaking research during which
he visited all the major centres of biro loss throughout the
galaxy and eventually came up with a quaint little theory which
quite caught the public imagination at the time. Somewhere in the
cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by
humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and
superintelligent shades of the colour blue, there was also a
planet entirely given over to biro life forms. And it was to this
planet that unattended biros would make their way, slipping away
quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew
they could enjoy a uniquely biroid lifestyle, responding to
highly biro-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the biro
equivalent of the good life.
And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet
Voojagig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have
worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of
cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up,
wrote a book, and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the
usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make a fool
of themselves in public.
When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates
that Voojagig had claimed for this planet they discovered only a
small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed
repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered
to be lying.
There did, however, remain the question of both the mysterious
60,000 Altairan dollars paid yearly into his Brantisvogan bank
account, and of course Zaphod Beeblebrox's highly profitable
second-hand biro business.
