The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy States and Canada with Hannibal Records and Simon and Schuster were later negotiated by Douglas Adams and his agent, Ed Victor, after gaining full rights to the recordings from Original Records, which went bankrupt. There have been three audiobook recordings of the novel. The first was an abridged edition (), recorded in the mid-1980s for the EMI label Music For Pleasure by Stephen Moore, best known for playing the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android in the radio series and in the TV series. In 1990, Adams himself recorded an unabridged edition for Dove Audiobooks (), later re-released by New
Phrases from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" "fits", the word Carroll used to name the chapters of "The Hunting of the Snark". There is the persistent tale that 42 is Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback. Another common guess is that 42 refers to the number of laws in cricket, a recurring theme of the books. Mathematicians found a question whose answer is 42: what is the largest (rational) number n such that there are positive integers "p", "q", "r" such that