Loading Search

• Buy this Book
• Read the First Chapter Free
• Book Creators
• Related Blog Posts
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Facebook

o Digitized edition with original illustration and NEW maps! (Kindle-friendly and easy on the eyes).
o A neat table of contents (TOC) and a separate index for quick navigation
o Fonts have been optimized and tested for display on Kindle and other e-readers
o This is the complete and unabridged edition of the original text.

The book was first published in September 1885 amid c... More

o Digitized edition with original illustration and NEW maps! (Kindle-friendly and easy on the eyes).
o A neat table of contents (TOC) and a separate index for quick navigation
o Fonts have been optimized and tested for display on Kindle and other e-readers
o This is the complete and unabridged edition of the original text.

The book was first published in September 1885 amid considerable fanfare, with billboards and posters around London announcing "The Most Amazing Book Ever Written". It became an immediate best seller. By the late 19th century, explorers were uncovering ancient civilisations around the world, such as Egypt's Valley of the Kings, and the empire of Assyria. Inner Africa remained largely unexplored and King Solomon's Mines, the first novel of African adventure published in English, captured the public's imagination.

The "King Solomon" of the book's title is the Biblical king renowned both for his wisdom and for his wealth. A number of sites have been suggested as the location of his mines, including the workings at the Timna valley near Eilat. Research published in September 2013 has shown that this site was in use during the 10th century BC as a copper mine possibly by the Edomites, who the Bible reports were rivals of and frequently at war with King Solomon.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Haggard wrote the novel as a result of a five-shilling wager with his brother, namely whether he could write a novel half as good as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. He wrote it in a short time, somewhere between six and sixteen weeks. However, because the book was a complete novelty, it was rejected by one publisher after another. When, after six months, King Solomon's Mines finally was published, the book became the year's best seller; the only problem (much to the chagrin of those who had rejected the manuscript) was how to print copies fast enough!

In the process, King Solomon's Mines created a new genre, known as the "Lost World", which would inspire 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. Lee Falk's The Phantom was initially written in this genre. A much later Lost World novel was Michael Crichton's Congo, which involves a quest for King Solomon's lost mines, supposedly located in a lost African city called Zinj.

You must be a member of JacketFlap to add a video to this page. Please Log In or Register.