Douglas Adams exhibition and book reveal his views on life, the universe and everything

Delving into the private notebooks of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams has unearthed some “golden nuggets”, according to his biographer and friend Kevin Jon Davies

Kevin’s book, which is being published to coincide with an exhibition of the Adams archive at St John’s College next month, has unearthed the trains of thought that led to some of the writer’s best ideas.

From the origins of some of his characters to the real reason Adams chose the number 42 as the answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything - the seeds of these ideas were tucked away in his notebooks.

And these reveal not only the brilliant flashes of inspiration that saw Adams become one of the funniest writers of his generation but also the agonies he suffered while writing.

Kevin explained: “Douglas Adams never meant to be a novelist, certainly not a science fiction novelist. His favourite books were things like PG Wodehouse. It’s just everything he wrote, all the weird ideas he had, invariably seemed to involve robots and spaceships; you don’t get a lot of that in Wodehouse. He was not a big sci-fi fan. I mean, he read some of the classics but he was quite rude about Isaac Asimov.”

However, these ideas about space, other worlds and aliens just kept cropping up. In a notebook dated from 1974/5, Adams has jotted down several early story musings, including one that any fan would recognise as the idea that years later was destined to become the HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Kevin has reproduced it in his biography 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams.

It reads: “Science fiction story.

“Man goes to friend; reveals that he is in fact an alien (they have known each other many years), he must now leave the Earth which is threatened with extinction and offers to take his friend with him.”

The notebooks are part of 67 boxes of papers, diaries, notebooks, essays and other relevant items from his career such as models and badges, that were donated to St John’s College in Cambridge, where he had studied as an undergraduate.

The archive was carefully catalogued by St John’s College library’s special collections assistant Dr Adam Crothers and was made available to Kevin during his research. The archive will go on display in the 17th-century college library for two days on September 15 and 16 as part of the Open Cambridge Festival.

Dr Crothers says: “The exhibition is going to be approximately chronological. But people don’t have to look at it in that way, if they don’t want to. The hope is that it will help to explain something about Adams’s life and career to people who don’t know that much about him, while also still satisfying people who are big fans.

“It’s going to be this lovely range of material. There are photographs and his notebooks, there are draft scripts and completed scripts. There are objects as well including little models made by one of the one of the designers from the Hitchhikers TV series. Even just physically it’s a really lovely range of material.

“I don’t know how Adams would feel about the idea of all of his papers and things that were in some cases just notes to himself being displayed in the library of his old Cambridge college. But, I hope he would find it amusing at least. I hope he would like the idea that some of this material might actually be sharing the case with mediaeval manuscripts.”

Douglas Adams, was best known as a comedy writer and author of the hugely popular The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, radio show and TV series. He also wrote the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency book series as well as The Meaning of Liff, Last Chance to See - about endangered species - and two stories for Doctor Who - The Pirate Planet and Shada - as well as co-writing City of Death.

When Adams died in 2001, aged just 49 following a heart attack at the gym, he left behind 67 boxes full of notebooks, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches and even poems.

In 42, compiled by Douglas’s long-time collaborator and friend Kevin Jon Davies, hundreds of these personal artefacts appear in print for the very first time.

Douglas was overflowing with creative ideas 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.

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 a plan for a TV series called The Secret Empire.

Kevin says: “I slowly worked through the archived material that had already been carefully catalogued by Adam, the librarian at St John’s. I found reading Douglas’s handwriting quite moving. He is a hero to me to millions so to see his precious words in his own handwriting or terrible typing was wonderful. We’re so lucky that all this hard copy exists because you know, he wrote his personal books at a time before computers.

“He became very tech savvy later on, and was much in demand as a tech guru at conferences and things. He always struck me as quite a chaotic sort of person, but this collection is more organised than perhaps his personality would have suggested. There were all sorts of little treasures amongst it all and my job was to boil it down to the best of everything for the book.”

The idea that the number 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything according to the computer Deep Thought is a central joke in the Hitchhiker’s series. Many people have tried to work out if Adams was transmitting a secret message with the number, even down to studying computer code.

But Kevin reckons 42 was a number that cropped up again and again in Adams’s earlier work - simply because he found it funny.

“In the book I try to address some of the myths that have sprung up around 42, the famous one being whether it was something to do with the the ASCII computer language in which ‘42’ is a designation for an asterisk. In that language an asterisk means ‘anything you want it to be,’ which is a neat idea but it’s nothing to do with that.”

Kevin found in the boxes of papers that Adams had used the number 42 several times in sketches before he used it in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books.

“He did say in a couple of interviews that when he was working on a film with John Cleese there had been a discussion about what was ‘the most plonking boring number’.

“I found his copy of that script and there in his script is the handwritten annotation ‘42 inches for a countertop that a fridge had to fit under’. In it, John Cleese played an irascible salesman in various scenarios, and then other actors played the good variety, who would help the customer. The number 42 cropped up again in various comedy sketches.

“I’ve tried to put every snippet into the book. So it shows this number was circulating in his mind when he wrote Hitchhiker’s. He just wanted a kind of dull joke, nothing number, and 42 was something that was hanging around and he just put that down. Later on, he decided that the answer and the question could not coexist in the same universe, which is why we don’t know what the true question of life, the universe and everything is. We only know the answer is 42.

“People came up with all these weird theories about it. It reminds me of when Douglas was asked about the meaning of Doctor Who and he answered that ‘if you type together all the titles across all the first years of the program, it all adds up to the secret location of Atlantis’.

“He was spoofing the the obsessive fans, I think.”

Kevin also found an original handwritten scene from the Hitchhiker’s Guide explaining why Biros always seem to disappear.

“This remains my favourite find. Douglas came up with the idea that Biros disappear through wormholes in space to a planet where they can live an entirely bioroid existence. Then there’s a whole story about somebody who discovers this planet and claims to work there. And then subsequently, the Biros will get exploited by a second Biro business. It was a whole sequence that was very familiar to any fans like myself. But the funniest thing was that half way through the scene he’s writing the ink changes colour - meaning he must have lost his Biro!”

The handwritten and typed scenes - often first drafts - in the archive reveal the frustration Adams experienced with the writing process, and how he was constantly missing deadlines.

Kevin says: “Reading the manuscripts you can see he was he was kind of sort of free flowing, writing a stream of consciousness and so he would suddenly mid paragraph he would berate himself, saying that it may my interest you to know you’re writing a load of garbage. There is one where he wrote: “Arthur Dent is a burk. He does not interest me. Ford Prefect is a burk. He does not interest me. Zaphod Beeblebrox is a burk. He does not ­interest me. Marvin is a burk. He does not interest me.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a burk. It does not interest me”

Kevin adds: “He would go off into a whole passage about dragons or something just whatever was on his mind. So I enjoyed that. I enjoyed finding rare bits of Hitchhiker’s that nobody’s seen.”

At one point Adams even gave up hope of making his money from writing - just before his success with Doctor Who and Hitchhiker’s Guide - and applied for a job with P&O.

When his publishers managed to nail him down, Adams would produce bestsellers but her struggled with deadlines. At one point he was locked in a hotel room by his publisher for several weeks and only allowed out for exercise in order to finish a book.

Kevin says: “When Douglas was writing the fourth book, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, the publisher actually had to lock him in a hotel room for a month, and stand over him practically. He said he was glumly sitting there typing on an old fashioned typewriter. While his publisher was glaring at him from across the street. He was allowed to go down to the hotel swimming pool or across the road to Hyde Park, to exercise. There’s a note in the book that says ‘I’ve gone out for a walk to clear my head. Here’s the latest few pages’, which shows this really happened.

”But they stood over it to make sure he got it done because he had blown all the deadlines. He used to say he liked deadlines, he liked the whooshing sound they made as they went past.”

Dr Crothers was the librarian who catalogued the archive when it first arrived from Douglas Adams’ family in a series of boxes.

He was familiar with the author but had not read a lot his work before starting the process.

“I was in this strange position, in some cases, of reading a lot of the notes and drafts for a particular project before I read the finished version. That was really exciting. I don’t know if one gets that many opportunities to get to know a writer in that direction. I found myself developing a huge amount of respect for his work ethic. Adams was troubled by deadlines but you can absolutely see looking through these papers that he was doing the work. He was not missing his deadlines because he was lazy. He was missing them because he really really cared about getting it right.”

“There were also many ideas in among the papers - some of which were quite detailed - showing that Adams had lots more projects in the pipeline. Adam says of one: “To me, the really exciting project was an epic science fiction TV series called The Secret Empire, which is so easy now to imagine as some Netflix phenomenon. He had several seasons of it mapped out. And it was a hugely ambitious thing that was going to explore technological advancements and the future of humanity.”

The plot summary for the series will be available for visitors to see in the exhibition and is included in the book.

“You can tell from this material that we’ve really lost something in not still having him around to talk about the way that technology has impacted us as a society - particularly smartphones and social media,” says Dr Crothers.

“He would have had lots to say about it. It’s entirely reasonable he could still be alive today writing and talking about this. I think it’s terribly sad not to have all of the protests that were conceived and not realised. It’s obvious that when he died he still wasn’t out of ideas. And he went out still wanting to do new work and still wanting to explore.”

Improbabilities: A Douglas Adams Exhibition that celebrates the publication of *42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams* will be held on September 15-16 at St John’s College. Visit opencambridge.cam.ac.uk/.

Kevin Jon Davies will be talking about his new book 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams at Heffers Bookshop on September 15 at 7pm. Visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/42-the-wildly-improbable-ideas-of-douglas-adams-tickets-703180390477 for tickets, priced from £8.