The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel) productions in the late 1970s. Davies himself appears as Prosser. This edition is out of print – Adams bought up many remainder copies and sold them, autographed, on his website. There have been three audiobook recordings of the novel. The first was an abridged edition (), recorded in the mid-1980s by Stephen Moore, best known for playing the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android in the radio series, LP adaptations and in the TV series. In 1990, Adams himself recorded an unabridged edition for Dove Audiobooks (), later re-released by New Millennium Audio () in the United States and available
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