King Solomon's Mines

This copy published 1902. With frontispiece, fold-out map and 7 illustrations. Previous ownership in front. 320 pages.

Published on September 30, 1885, the first printing consisted of a total of 2000 copies. Of these, the first 1000 copies contained publisher advertisements dated August, 1885. Another 500 copies of this, the first printing, contained ads dated October, 1885. The remaining 500 copies of the first printing were sent as sheets to Cassell & Co. in New York who bound them up in November, 1885 for the first American edition.

King Solomon's Mines began as a five-shilling bet, Haggard wagering his brother that he could write a novel as captivating as R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883). Haggard wrote the novel - the story of a search into an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain - in a whirlwind, somewhere between six and sixteen weeks. The book was rejected by every publisher that Haggard submitted it to, save one; it was too much of a novelty. It was the first English adventure novel set in Africa. When the book was finally accepted and soon published by Cassell & Co. in September 1885 (only six months after Haggard placed a period at the end of the novel's last sentence) it was marketed with considerable promotional zeal, billboards and posters around London heralding it as "The Most Amazing Book Ever Written."

It was an immediate best seller; indeed it was the best-selling novel of the year. Cassell & Co.'s only problem was printing copies fast enough to satisfy the wild demand for the book, which had captured the public's imagination at a time when new explorations in as yet uncharted regions tantalized the world. Considered to be the foundation novel of the Lost World literary genre, King Solomon's Mines inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot; Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World; Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King; and HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. (www.abebooks.com)