At last! For many, many years readers have wondered: why is the number 42 the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything? What was Douglas Adams thinking when wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? How did he know that 42 contained all there is to know about everything? It has taken amateur numerological sleuth and genuine Douglas Adams fan Peter Gill over ten years to marshall his evidence, and finally he can reveal the truth. 42 really is the amazingly accurate answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everthing! For Douglas Adams fans and lovers of QI alike, this is the perfect tongue-in-cheek compendium of remarkable facts. Roaming far and wide - from rock music to Eastern architecture, transatlantic rowing records to Adolf Hitler, cricket to Nijinsky - this is the ultimate collection of esoteric and confounding information. No stone has been unturned. To get to the very heart of the secret of 42, Gill has scoured the world for information. He has visited Ken Walsh, the author of the famous volume The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe, which served as the setting-off point for Adams's great adventure, and discovered a fascinating new nugget. He has counted, added, multiplied and divided. The 42 hours which it took the Beatles to record Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da pales into insignificance beside his research efforts. Although, unlike Sir Paul McCartney, who waited 42 years after recording that song to actually perform it live, Peter Gill is ready now to share his arcane secrets with the world.

About the Author

Peter Gill was born in England and educated in Longridge, Blackburn and Reading, from where he went to Oxford but left early when he realised there wasn't quite enough of interest to sustain a full weekend. On the occasions when work has troubled his day he has conveyed the impression of being a government research scientist, radio journalist, college lecturer, something in IT, PR drone, and itinerant sheep shearer. He now lives in a Shropshire home, accompanied by one wife, up to four daughters, a cat, the F dog, five chickens and six goldfish. He has promised never, ever, to try and keep stick insects again. His time is largely divided between the kitchen and a room on the top floor with a handy bolt on the outside. This is his first book if you're not counting the pamphlet on electric fencing.

Reviews

If all this thinking about the brain makes your brain hurt, relaxation is at hand with this rather admirably pointless compendium of instances of the number 42. That was what the computer Deep Thought (presumably after consulting all its modules) announced was the answer to life, the universe and everything in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. We learn here that 42C is a normal body temperature for a chickenA" (a not-yet-roasted chicken, I take it), the length in days of Roman Polanski's imprisonment for psychiatric evaluation, the diameter in inches of the world's deepest hole and the equivalent, in millions of sticks of dynamite, of the energy contained in one gram of matter. An author who offers extracts from two of my favourite Wikipedia pagesA" is not making any great claims to literary or conceptual merit, but the book does offer a touching tribute to and mini-biography of Douglas Adams himself, and is overall a friendly, semi-satirical celebration of human pattern-seeking. Can it really be a coincidence that exactly 42 cups of coffee have elapsed since I first saw this book?A" - The Guardian