We were thrilled to be asked by the team at Unbound to run the publicity launch campaign for 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams - the incredible archive of notebooks, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches and even poems of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy's Douglas Adam shared by his long-time collaborator Kevin Jon Davies.
There is nothing more exciting than sharing a special book the media and with Douglas having such a cult following we knew they would not wait to get their hands on it!
With features and interviews in all the national newspapers including the Daily Telegraph, The Times, Guardian and interviews on the BBC, in magazines such as SFX and on a heap of podcasts it was no wonder 42 flew to number one on The Sunday Times bestseller list and on Amazon. An exciting and fast paced campaign, just how we like it!
42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams
by Douglas Adams & Kevin Jon Davies
When Douglas Adams died in 2001, he left behind 60 boxes full of notebooks, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches and even poems. In 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.
