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 . Kevin Jon Davies helped animate the Book sequences for the TV show, and directed 1993 documentary . More recently, he scoured the archive for “odd scraps” which could be stirred into the radio production of Eoin Colfer’s novel This led to publisher Unbound approaching him about a book.
