‘Douglas’s slanted way of looking at reality makes the fuzzy sharp and the improbable probable. In a cock-eyed universe the level gaze is not much use’ - Stephen Fry

When Douglas Adams died in 2001, he left behind 60 boxes full of notebooks, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches and even poems. In the Sunday Times bestselling 42, compiled by Douglas's long-time collaborator Kevin Jon Davies, hundreds of these personal artefacts appear in print for the very first time.

Douglas was as much a thinker as he was a writer, and his artefacts reveal how his deep fascination with technology led to ideas which were far ahead of their time: a convention speech envisioning the modern smartphone, with all the information in the world living at our fingertips; sheets of notes predicting the advent of electronic books; journal entries from his forays into home computing - it is a matter of legend that Douglas bought the very first Mac in the UK; musings on how the internet would disrupt the CD-Rom industry, among others.

42 also features archival material charting Douglas's school days through Cambridge, Footlights, collaborations with Graham Chapman, and early scribbles from the development of Doctor Who, Hitchhiker's and Dirk Gently. Alongside details of his most celebrated works are projects that never came to fruition, including the pilot for radio programme They'll Never Play That on the Radio and a space-inspired theme park ride.

Douglas's personal papers prove that the greatest ideas come from the fleeting thoughts that collide in our own imagination, and offer a captivating insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers and most enduring storytellers.

About Kevin Jon Davies

Kevin Jon Davies is a television and video director primarily associated with documentaries and spin-off videos associated with Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Blake's 7. He also worked on the BAFTA award-winning animation sequences of the 1981 Hitchhiker's Guide television adaptation.

Davies wrote and directed the documentaries The Making of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Doctor Who: Thirty Years in the TARDIS. The latter was commissioned for and aired on BBC One in 1993, in conjunction with the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who. Davies later expanded the documentary for video release under the title More Than Thirty Years in the TARDIS. Portions of other interviews by Davies have also appeared on Doctor Who DVD releases, such as The Beginning box set, and the two-DVD set for City of Death. Davies has also worked on the DVD extras for other BBC titles, such as Dad's Army and The Andromeda Anthology.