Life, The Universe And Everything

A NEW BOOK ABOUT DOUGLAS ADAMS PRESENTS TREASURES FROM THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY CREATOR'S ARCHIVE. EDITOR KEVIN JON DAVIES GIVES US A PREVIEW

- IAN BERRIMAN

THE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS OF St John's College, Cambridge are a prestigious place in which to have your life documented. Correspondence from poets such as William Wordsworth and Stéphane Mallarmé is housed here, as are the personal papers of former students like Samuel Butler (author of Erewhon) and photographer Sir Cecil Beaton. Since 2012, after the death of his widow prompted the sale of their former home, another alumnus has been filed alongside them: Douglas Adams. Now treasures from his archive have been collected in a new book, 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas Of Douglas Adams.

Its editor has a long history with The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Kevin Jon Davies helped animate the Book sequences for the TV show, and directed 1993 documentary The Making Of The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy. More recently, he scoured the archive for "odd scraps" of HHGTTG which could be stirred into the radio production of Eoin Colfer's Hitchhiker's novel And Another Thing... This led to publisher Unbound approaching him about a book.

With 67 boxes of materials (of which Davies reckons he viewed "well over 85%"), he had to make some tough choices. "It was a case of trying to find the best, and something that would be nicely self-contained," he explains, "because a lot of stuff was too long." So for example, a lengthy speech on mobile phones is represented via Adams's crib notes.

"I tried to get something from across his whole life," Davies continues. "We start with the school days. We've got his university work, all his Footlights [the Cambridge University revue] and amateur dramatic stuff - there's some posters he did himself for his comedy troupe. Then all the famous stuff that we know. There's a big section on Hitchhiker's of course, Doctor Who, Dirk Gently... everything's covered, right up to the very end."