I just stumbled upon a French Yahoo Answers page that asks why 42 is the answer. Of course, it’s because Douglas Adams (I once met him, he went to the same school as me) thought it was the number with the greatest comedic potential: and possibly even because he half-remembered that John Cleese once thought it was a funny number.
But I digress.
One of the Yahoo answers suggested was that 42 was the number of missing pages in the Voynich Manuscript. Well… according to Rene Zandbergen’s splendiferous site, there are probably at least 14 folios missing, which would account for 28 or so missing pages (depending on how wide the folios were): but sorry to say, this is still a fair bit short of 42.
Nice try, though! 🙂