Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth.

Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

OK, I haven’t spent fifteen years on this book as it only came out in 2023 but sometimes it felt like it, which is odd as Adams is one of the funniest writers I know of but this book seems to have things included just because it seemed a good idea at the time and the material was too hand. Things like his old school reports, although why on Earth Douglas still had those is beyond me, mine were binned years ago. Lots of the handwritten documents are transcribed, even if they are perfectly legible, but annoyingly the notes for Douglas’s first Doctor Who script, ‘The Pirate Planet, are not transcribed and I really struggled to read those so could have done with a typed version. The book looks great though with hundreds of documents from the life and career of Douglas Adams reproduced in pretty well chronological order so you can follow his development as a writer and also marvel at the mass of material represented here, the man doesn’t seem to have ever thrown anything away. From letters of apology to girlfriends to odd notes on ideas which may or may not have been used at some point to pages from scripts showing ideas being rejected or improved frankly it should have been more fascinating than I found it to be.

Douglas Adams was sadly taken from us at the age of just forty nine, dying of a heart attack whilst working out in gym so we never got to see what he would really have done with his unfinished work ‘The Salmon of Doubt’. It was intended to be the third Dirk Gently book but according to this volume it could have morphed into the sixth Hitch-Hikers novel. The problem with Adams was that he used to take an inordinate amount of time crafting each of his books or scripts and often would only actually complete something when absolutely forced to and as quoted in the posthumously published ‘The Salmon of Doubt’ which included what he had written so far along with various other articles by Adams and others.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Having said all I have earlier regarding the selection and sometimes presentation of what is included there is nevertheless much to enjoy in this book including a lot of not very well known material in the later sections detailing Adams’s work on the computer game Starship Titanic and his environmental endeavours with naturalist Mark Carwardine and also the charity Save the Rhino. Whilst I knew about and loved the radio programme, and book, he and Carwardine made called ‘Last Chance to See’, where they travelled the world looking for endangered animals I wasn’t aware before reading this of just how involved Adams had been with Save the Rhino. His involvement with rock band Pink Floyd was also a surprise and I would have loved to see the projected Millennium work outlined in this volume which I knew nothing about.

All in all this is probably a book for dipping into rather than reading from cover to cover and I’m sure I’ll enjoy reading sections again in the future but won’t attempt to read the whole thing again. It is also large (30cm x 21.7cm and 320 pages) and heavy (just over 1.8kg) so not a very comfortable book to hold, but it needs to be that big to reproduce the documents at mostly full size.

The editor certainly knows his stuff and worked on numerous projects with Adams over the years, from designing the Illustrated Hitch-Hikers Guide and directing for the BBC the documentary ‘The Making of the HItchhikers Guide along with a retrospective of the first thirty years of Doctor Who. The book is another crowd funded production by Unbound of which I have several examples now and will undoubtedly get more as they keep coming up with interesting production ideas.