Robert E. Howard mentioned in a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith that he bought Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World in June 1923. He had the Hodder & Stoughton edition from 1912.

The Lost World is a classic adventure novel. Its first publication was in The Strand magazine, which serialized the novel monthly from April to November 1912.

The genesis of the novel stemmed from a talk given by Col. P. H. Fawcett in 1911. Fawcett had described a plateau on the Brazil-Bolivia border and tracks of unknown origin.

Professor Challenger, a loud and exuberant scientist, the reporter Edward Malone, Summerlee, Challenger's rival, and Lord John Roxton travel to an isolated plateau near the Brazil-Peru border. They have a difficult time getting on the plateau. They find a land inhabited by dinosaurs including a theropod, pterosaurs of a nasty nature, stegosaurus, an iguanodon, and plesiosaurus in a lake in the center of the plateau. Phorusrhacos, the terror bird, is present; Megaloceros (the “Irish Elk”), and a giant armadillo, the Glyptodon, make an appearance. It is a place of wonder.

They engage in a genocidal war with a group of ape-men who are at war with a tribe of Indians. I don't think it is a coincidence that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core came out less than two years later in All-Story Weekly.

Doyle is at his peak in this novel. This was a period he was writing fantastic fiction such as “The Terror of Blue John Gap” and “The Horror of the Heights.”

I first heard of The Lost World in an article by Lin Carter on lost race stories in a comic book tie-in to the 1975 movie Land That Time Forgot. My 12 year old self thought the novel sounded great. I did not read it until I was in college and found a copy at a used bookstore. I should have come across the book in my youth buying Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. G. Wells novels. I checked isfdb.org and there was no American edition from the late ‘60s (Berkley) until 1993 (Tor) when Jurassic Park came out. This still surprises me how long the book was out of print in the U.S. This is a book that should be on every fan of great adventure fiction’s bookshelf, next to Jack London’s The Star Rover. I have a Wordsworth edition containing all the Professor Challenger stories. I reread the novel this past summer enjoying it even more than when I first read it.