42. The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams

42, The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams (Unbound 2023) is a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book which trawls through the personal papers, drafts, scripts, notebooks and diaries of the much-missed humorous author (and later tech guru) Douglas Adams, who died aged just 49, in 2001. A famous procrastinator, Adams regularly berated himself within the body of his draft manuscripts for not remembering an idea or for not getting to grips with his complex plots and hilarious characters. The book covers his life, from cradle to grave, including his time living in Stalbridge, Dorset, his years at Cambridge Footlights and at the BBC.

Douglas Adams lived at Stalbridge, where he wrote much of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. He died in 2001 at the age of just 49. Kevin J Davies worked with Douglas Adams and will be at Sturminster Newton Literary Festival to talk about how he used personal papers and documents to create 42. The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams.