42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams is a forthcoming book, approved by Douglas Adams's estate and family, that will explore the late author's "unseen archives". A crowdfunding campaign is already complete, but you can still preorder.
After his death in 2001, Douglas Adams's papers were loaned to his old Cambridge college, St John's – over 60 boxes full of notebooks, research, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches, to-do lists, hard drives and even poems.
The book will reproduce in facsimile form extracts from the archive with explanatory text and footnotes to add context. Developed in close association with Adams's family and literary estate, 42 will be a full-colour, large-format hardback that follows his career from early collaborations with Graham Chapman to his work on Doctor Who, through the Hitchhiker years, Dirk Gently, his groundbreaking non-fiction book Last Chance to See and his later digital work. Alongside this are details of projects that never came to fruition like a proposed theme park ride and a TV series provisionally entitled The Secret Empire.
