Never read his any book but I think he must have been joking.

well i think 42 means 42 ....     

Now i m gonna tell you one thing which is confidential..
I chatted with him once and he told me what 42 is But sadly I cannot share it with anyone and the secret must go with me to the grave.
A few lines from our conversation...
****
HapTork: Hi!
Douglas: Hello!
HapTork: I plead you. Please tell me what 42 is? I m not gonna tell it to any one please.
Douglas: Its a secret. When I got 42 yrs old, I understood what this whole universe is. Whats the aim of our life and why we are here. 42 explains this all. The experien
****

So buddies Here I pasted three sentences(1st by me 2nd by douglas and third again by me) and the fourth which I didnt pasted was the answer by douglas and I cant tell you that.

yeah I'm read all book, and really like those.
Adams have great ( but not really popular) humour.. so 42..
I think this answer right, because 'big brother' Google say that too!

As I remember it, Prak explained that the explanation for the ultimate answer and the ultimate question can never be contained within the same Universe...

The 2 would cancel each other out - destroying the present Universe and replacing it with something even more bizarre.

Consider this - a Universe in which Zubaz follows Jafo around with a spellchecker...

It's almost worth it

Douglas Adams actually said that it was simply meant as a joke and nothing more than that. 42 was simply the first plain boring numbe he could think of.

Everybody knows the ultimate answer is 42. But little chosen have information about the ultimate question. That is more important. I've red all of 5 books. I loved it. aaaeee... one more think: DON'T PANIC

he meant 42 is the awesomest number on earth its 7x6 and six is the devils number...... OMG 7 ate 9 !!!!! ZOMG!!! RUN!

Really folks.....42.....thing about it....42....I've read all the books and have found the answer to life, the universe and every thing...it is forty-two. Really. The Answer to THE universe, life and everthing IS 42. So long and thanks for all of the fish......!  

sales must be dropping so why not spark controversy... it makes things sell.. and if it is done right it makes one immortal

Kinda lame that something like that can't be shared, would be a great legacy to leave the world. Make me think it's all just bollocks, or as The__Goo said, a marketing gimmick to spark sales.

Like me....."Mostly Harmless" ...

42 is obviously the number of the bus stop where hitch hikers go when they can't otherwise get a ride.

because one is half of the other but its greater than the sum of its parts as a whole, pretty obvious

At the end of the first radio series (and television series, and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe book) Arthur Dent having escaped the Earth's destruction potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain, attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively[6] suggested by Marvin the Paranoid Android, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out FORTY TWO. Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE?" “ "Six by nine. Forty two." "That's it. That's all there is." "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe"[5] ”