I knew there were some Douglas Adams fans in here! Let us not miss our chance to educate the younger among us about the finer points of calligraphy!
I read the first three in the 1980s. I think I read "the fourth book in the trilogy" around when it came out too (1992), but I don't think I bought it, so I must have borrowed it from somebody. Either that or I
did buy it and loaned it to somebody and never got it back. And I don't really remember much about that fourth book.
I also played the Infocom game, and that was pretty entertaining. It did a pretty good job of bringing the style of humor to a text-adventure-game format. Friends and I played it when it came out in the '80s, and then I played it myself through
The Lost Treasures of Infocom. I got
The Lost Treasures of Infocom in the early '90s, but I think I only played the
Hitchhiker's Guide game again in the aughts. Anyway, the game can be played online free. It's
here.
I watched parts of the TV adaptation back in the '80s (I think it showed up at night on some PBS station), and I watched the movie on a computer in the mid-aughts. I've forgotten most of that too.
The thing is that while I probably did read the first three books more than once each, I don't think I read any of them after the 1980s. Now I'm wondering if they're at the house where I grew up in Maine.