Arthur Conan Doyle was famous already. He was the creator of Sherlock Holmes and he could have rested on those laurels (and big bucks) forever. But he didn’t. He tired of Holmes and so he wrote other things. One of those was the adventure novel, The Lost World (1912). (The book was so seminal that all stories of this type are now called ‘lost world’ novels.) The book was a sensation in its own right. Action, exploration, cavemen and dinosaurs, it changed everything in the world of adventure. Before Doyle, writers penned tales of life in prehistoric times. Or they wrote about adventurers finding a dinosaur in the thick jungles of Africa. Even Jules Verne had dinosaurs inside the earth, but it wasn’t the same. Doyle catalyzed something in this book, some kind of magic…
After The Lost World, it was a whole new ball game. Stories of dinosaurs and cavemen exploded in books and Pulps and to this day there are still people who don’t know that the terrible lizards and prehistoric men were separated by 65 million years. It no longer mattered. Doyle gave us One Million Years BC with Rachel Welsh in her prehistoric bikini, The Flintstones with their pet Dino, and every kind of jungle dude riding dinosaurs in prehistoric oases around the world. Edgar Rice Burroughs had a lot to do with it, but Doyle was first.
It’s not surprising that such a famous author and such a great book would recent wonderful illustrations. Not just once but twice.
The Strand Magazine for April-November 1912 published the novel in eight installments with illustrations by Harry Rountree. Rountree has that classic gouache wash look that so many Strand illustrators had. Hodder & Stoughton published the novel in Britain in 1912 using the Rountree artwork.
The American publisher George H. Doran published the novel in 1912 with illustrations by master of pen and ink, Joseph Clement Coll. Where Roundtree created soft edges, Coll gives strong contrasts and lovely line work.
Caspak, Pellucidar, The Lost Land, Hawk of the Wilderness, Dwellers in the Mirage, etc., etc. etc. The door to wild adventure are now wide open….