The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide - Douglas Adams

This is another economical but quite nice looking edition with gilded edges and a ribbon bookmark. The nicest touch, I think, is the inside cover which is patterned with the iconic 'taunting planet' that adorned the covers of Adams’ paperbacks during the 70’s (although I’ve always been disappointed that the publishers decided not to put DON’T PANIC in large, friendly letters on the cover of this collection). The story of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels is a highly comic romp through the universe with Arthur Dent, a human displaced from his home after Earth is demolished by beuraucratic aliens in order to make way for an interstellar bypass. So much of Arthur Dent's journey in this five-book trilogy (this is Adams' term and perhaps the kind of humour we can expect from a novelist who also wrote for Monty Python’s Flying Circus) is concerned with his search for a home and I’ve always felt this strikingly relevant since I read this volume cover-to-cover during the summer of 2003, my first summer back from college and the last summer I ever spent at home.

Adams, Douglas. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide. New York: Portland House, 1986.