| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9781400052936 | | Publisher: Random House Inc | | Publish Date: 4/10/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 36380185 | | Item#: B3VQ4Q | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9H x 7.75L x 1T | | Pages: 272 | | Edition Number: 25 |
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| | | Packed with an Astounding Amount of New and Never-Before-Collected Material.
Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?
No one but Douglas Adams could have pared life's meaning down to these three questions, and they remain as inspired and head-scratchingly clever today as they did twenty-five years ago when they appeared in the first edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Showcasing his quick wit, comic genius, and wide-ranging intelligence, "Hitchhiker's has become nothing less than a cult classic and cultural phenomenon.
To celebrate its quarter century and the extraordinary legacy of Adams, this gorgeously designed, mostly harmless deluxe edition gathers never-before-collected photographs, original artwork, memorabilia (from the strange to the sublime), and wisdom gleaned from a first read or first encounter as Douglas's friends remember how the galaxy was forever changed a mere twenty-five years ago (not to mention the original text of the novel) into a one-of-a-kind Guide as stunning as two suns setting over Magrathea.
Whether you are well versed in the antics of Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered Earthman plucked from his planet seconds before it's demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, and Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy posing as an out-of-work actor, or are hitching a ride for the first time, this is the book that has everything you'll nee to know about anything.So please do not be alarmed. Definitely don't panic. Just be sure to grab a towel.
Annotation:
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY is not just a book--it's a phenomenon. It's based on a BBC radio series that also spawned four other books, a TV series, a movie, a text-based computer adventure game, and a website. Arthur Dent is having a bad day. First, the town council knocked his house down to build a local bypass. Then a fleet of alien spaceships blew up his planet to make way for an intragalactic bypass. Can things get any worse? Possibly. Having been rescued from the Earth's destruction by his friend Ford Prefect, Arthur embarks upon a hectic, hysterically funny adventure that includes torturously bad poetry, a depressed robot, the two-headed President of the Galaxy (currently on the lam), and the legendary planet-building planet of Magrathea. Arthur's only consolation is the wise advice printed on the cover of that classic tome, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY: "Don't Panic." This deluxe edition has a lengthy introduction detailing the origins and the subsequent wide-ranging popular impact of the book and its spinoffs. The introduction also contains photographs of people, places, and objects relating to the series. Each page of the actual novel is framed by two-color pixilated illustrations.
| PraiseNew York Times Book Review
"[A] gorgeously pretentious...edition....As for the novel itself, it remains, without a doubt, the most cheerful book about the total destruction of Earth and its entire population minus one ever written." - Gerald Jonas 03/20/2005 |
| Author Bio| Douglas Adams | | The award-winning author of the definitive guide to slogging around in outer space, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, was born and raised in Cambridge, England. While studying English at St. John's College, Cambridge, Adams began to write, perform in, and direct stage plays. Through this experience he got a job as a script supervisor on the influential cult TV show, DR. WHO--Adams also said that he worked as everything from a chicken shed cleaner to a bodyguard. In 1978 he wrote what many still consider his best work, the science fictional satire that became the original BBC radio series, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE....The record album of that first series, as well as the second series, won awards from the British Science Fiction Association in 1979, 1980, and 1981. Following THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE... radio series, Adams adapted his scripts and produced the first novel of what was originally intended as a trilogy, though it eventually stretched to five novels and a short story. With the publication of the fourth book in the "trilogy," and with his subject matter becoming simultaneously more environmentally aware and much darker in tone, Adams arrived at two important themes of his later work--ecological concern and a more pervasive sense of pessimism. He explores the first theme in his non-fiction account--co-written with Mark Carwardine--of traveling to see the last surviving members of various endangered animal species around the world. The second theme, addressed in the Dirk Gently series, delved more fully into the defects of the human condition, although a sense of comedy remained. Adams returned to finish up the Hitchhiker trilogy with a final, fifth volume. Following that, Adams, a longtime fan of Macintosh computers, developed several CD-ROM games, based both on his own published novels and on original ideas--one of the latter, STARSHIP TITANIC, was novelized by Adams's friend, Monty Python co-founder Terry Jones. Adams married Jane Belson on November 25, 1991 and the couple had a daughter, Polly Jane--nicknamed "Rocket"--on June 22, 1994. He died of a heart attack on May 11, 2001, only two days after Asteroid 18610 (which had been discovered in 1998) was officially named Arthurdent, in honor of the main character in THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. |
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