It was a huge surprise when we heard the news. There will be another book with some Douglas Adams orignal and unpublished texts available soon!
The last time a book was published under Douglas Adams’ name it was “Salmon of Doubt” in 2002. We all knew there were some interesting stuff (notes, texts, essays, poems,..) yet available in Douglas Adams archives in Cambridge. Dirk Maggs used some of this stuff when he worked on the new radio adaptations of the last hitchhiker books and the Dirk Gently ones. Then of course, Jem Roberts had also access to these archives when he wrote his biography about Douglas Adams “The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (2014).
But what if a long time fan and Hitchhiker legend, like Kevin Davies (who collaborated to almost all version of Hitchhiker!), had full access to this archive? Well, the publisher Unbound made our dream come true!
A kickstarter campaign has been launched by Unbound and the €75,424 goal was reached in less than 24 hours. Less than 48 hours before the end of the campaign, the campaign reached €295,516 with no less than 4593 backers!
The campaign ends Thursday April 22 2021 12:59 AM CEST. If you want to get a copy signed, or collector, or both, act quickly. The book will probably available in bookshops but right now we don’t have much informations.
The book will be entitled “42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams” and will be “a full colour, large format hardback, featuring never-seen-before extracts from Douglas’s extraordinary archive”.
If you don’t like kickstater you can also pre order the book on the publisher’s website as already more than 2600 subscribers dit https://unbound.com/books/douglasadams/
Estimated publication should be around September 2022.
“After his death in 2001, Douglas Adams’s papers were loaned to his old Cambridge college, St John’s – over 60 boxes full of notebooks, research, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches, to-do lists, hard drives and even poems.
The book will reproduce in facsimile form extracts from the archive with explanatory text and footnotes to add context. Developed in close association with Adams’s family and literary estate, 42 will be a full-colour, large-format hardback that follows his 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.
All backers (except for those at the digital poster level) will get their name printed in a special list of supporters at the back of the book.”
