Etienne Leopold Trouvelot, The Planet Jupiter, 1881. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Macmillan
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Don't panic.
$40.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Douglas Adams; illus. Chris Riddell
- Publisher
- Macmillan
- Published
- January 2021
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
The Answer Was Never the Point
Douglas Adams began Hitchhiker as a BBC radio serial in 1978 and turned it into a novel the following year, whereupon it sold a quarter of a million copies in its first months and became a permanent fixture of English comic writing. The Earth is demolished for a bypass in chapter three; what survives is Arthur Dent in his dressing gown, the imperturbable Guide with DON'T PANIC on the cover, and the revelation that the answer to life, the universe and everything is forty-two, the question being unavailable.
The joke has outlived its author, who died in 2001, and its technology, which the Guide itself now resembles. Macmillan marked the book's forty-second anniversary in 2021 with this edition illustrated by Chris Riddell, one absurdist institution decorating another.
In the Collections
