DOYLE, Arthur Conan (1859-1930). The Lost World. London, Ne...

Large 8vo. 13 mounted plates including portrait frontispiece (several in color), 2 maps. Original light blue cloth lettered in gilt with design of footprints in blind on upper cover, gilt top edge, others uncut (spine sunned, some rubbing to fore-corners, some light soiling to covers, tiny white stain on front cover near bottom edge); folding box.

FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE OF THE LARGE PAPER COPY. “Although 1,000 copies were prepared, only 190 were bound. The remainder were transferred to the second issue” (Green and Gibson). In 1910, Doyle’s idea of a prehistoric world first sprung to life after being introduced by the English diplomat Roger Casement at the Royal Societies Club at a complimentary luncheon to Commander Peary on his return from the North Pole. As an English consul tasked with investigating colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples, Casement was at that time preparing for his trip to Peru to study hardship among the employees of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. This is when Doyle outlined the plot of his story to take place in South America. Doyle’s fascination with prehistoric fossils and tools he had discovered at Windlesham also helped set his “imagination at work on the period to which they belong and resulted in… The Lost World” (St. John Adcock in an interview with Doyle). For the central character of Professor Challenger, Doyle used himself as inspiration as well as Professor Rutherford whom he had known at Edinburgh, although it was Doyle who posed for the “fake photographs” seen in the book. The first draft of the story appeared in an archaeological journal, but the bulk of the writing was done between October and December 1911. The complete story was then serialized in the Strand Magazine after the editor heard the idea of the story and remarked that it would make “the very best serial” that he had ever done. The editor later recalled that the “author also drew up his own advertisement in which he said that a friend has asserted that all possibilities were exhausted for a story of action, to which the novelist responded that there ‘was a large field which had not yet been worked, and that is should develop upon the lines of a combination of imagination and realism each pushed as far as the writer’s capacity would carry him’” (Green and Gibson A37c).