A common question about Douglas Adams’ famous Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is just why Adams chose the number 42 as the answer to life, the universe and everything. In a charming trivia book, author Peter Gill takes 50 pages or so to look into the story of the book and the author and another 250 to find occurrences of 42 in the worlds of sport, crime, science and a wide range of other fields.

Everyone will have their own personal favourite facts and figures from this excellent col More...

This book represents a continuation of my obsession with all things Douglas Adams and indeed Douglas Adamsy. coming off my train home after having purchased it in Kings Cross station i was 42 pages into it, i'm sure Mr Gill must have arranged the pages in such a way as to facilitate the glorious event and i thank him for it.

An average book. It can sometimes be quite puzzling how some facts relate to 'the number' but it has some interesting theories about 42

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I am not really sure what I was expecting here; a collection of reasons why 42 was such a good number to pick as the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything or examples of Douglas Adams predicting advances in science fiction that turned out to be true in science fact! Either way I started reading this with my expectations way too high and so was disappointed in the end. This is by no measure a bad book but I just feel that it could have been so much better.