42

Over 60 boxes full of notebooks, research, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches, to-do lists, hard drives and even poems...Welcome to the incredible archive of Douglas Adams.

After his death in 2001, Douglas Adams's papers were loaned to his old Cambridge college, St John's. Reproduced here, in facsimile form and in close association with Adams's family and literary estate, 42 is a full-colour, large-format hardback that follows Adams career from early collaborations with Graham Chapman to his work on Doctor Who, through the Hitchhiker years, Dirk Gently, his groundbreaking non-fiction book Last Chance to See and his later digital work. Alongside this are details of projects that never came to fruition like a proposed theme park ride and a TV series provisionally entitled The Secret Empire.

Edited by Kevin Jon Davies, who has worked on a number of Hitchhiker-related projects and had a personal friendship with Adams spanning more than twenty years.

• 'The prevailing mood of 42 ... is joyous celebration of a phenomenal mind and a huge talent for surreal humour' Sunday Times
• 'It is a rare opportunity to be granted insight into the earliest machinations of a beloved artwork, but that is what Davies offers us with this meticulous archive' Reader's Digest
• 'It really brings Adams to life in your imagination. Reading a drafted apology to a girlfriend for being "bloody stupid", or a page of typescript in which the author talks to himself (“It may interest you to know that you are writing garbage…“), you get a strong sense of the man - the fully-rounded individual, with all his frustrations and quirks, not just the towering wit of repute' SFX Magazine
• ‘Although there can be no new Douglas Adams novels, crowdfunded publisher Unbound has given us the next best thing. It’s a beautifully produced selection of Adams’ work taken from 60 boxes of notebooks and memorabilia left behind at his death' Daily Express

Kevin Jon Davies grew up enthralled with Doctor Who and The Goon Show. The Hitchhiker's Guide radio series in 1978 combined the best of both, so the young art student sought out its little-known author Douglas Adams, recording an early fanzine interview. Following a career in film and tv, he went on to direct The Making of Hitchhiker, the 1993 documentary for BBC Video. Adams then invited Davies to art-direct The Illustrated Hitchhiker, a large-format book with pioneering digital composites. Since then he has contributed to a number of Adams-related projects, including as researcher into Adams' archives for The Hexagonal Phase (2018); the final radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

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