Violet Books

Rita Mohler Hanson's A Desert Road to Shani Lun: A Romance of Mongolia was issued in Portland, Oregon, in 1939, with a lavishly beautiful dustwrapper, cloth embossure illustration, and pictorial endpapers by Northwest artist H. L. Price. This rare adventure fantasy of occult powers and reincarnation, by an author raised in Asia, takes us to the remote location of a Lost Race dwelling in their new Shangri-la in the Gobi desert.

Bruce Carter's The Perilous Descent: Into a Strange Lost World was first published by the Bodley Head in 1952. This action oriented dustwrapper is from a Hamilton reissue in 1964. Carter's book tells of a lost race discovered in the bowels of the same Hollow Earth about which Edgar Poe and Jules Verne likewise speculated.

Harold Lamb's 1947 adventure epic A Garden to the Eastward was blessed by a stunning pictorial dw. This time around, the Lost Race, of utopian disposition, is hidden in an extinct volcano somewhere beyond Kurdistan. Volcanic craters were popular hideaways by peoples avoiding change or discovery. The author knew the Near East first hand and his descriptions of the land are winning, though his politics are sometimes goofy.

John G. Rowe's The Secret of the Golden Idol (Cupples & Leon, 1928) is a Lost Race juvenile featuring a subterranean temple, a battle with apes, & several other fantastical ingredients to spice a tropical island adventure. The author wrote six volumes in this Adventure Stories for Boys series, & veteran series writer Roy Snell added a seventh title to the set. The last two in the series overlap another series created by the same author, the "Northwest Series" mostly featuring the Canadian Mounties.

The Isle of Forgotten People (1925) by Thompson Cross boasts a binding with cameo action illustration by John de Walton, who also contributes a full color frontispiece and three other action plates within. This time the Lost Race lurks deep into unknown regions of China. The story also features a Colossus-of-Rodes type gigantic Buddha and is jam-packed with derring-do.

According to Diómedes de Pereyra's The Land of the Golden Scarabs (1928) there lingers a miraculous golden civilization cloistered in a sunny valley hemmed in by rainforests in the Montana region of South America west of the Madera River. The tale unfolds the conflict between development engineers confronted by the cradle of life.

Roy J. Snell was a world-travelled adventurer in his own right, and whether he set his tales in the tropics or the arctic circle, his descriptions have an authentic ring because he'd been to all these places. The Red Lure (1926) was a jungle adventure with such fantasy elements as a wailing ghost and a Lost Race discovered in the wilds of Honduras.

This "fantastic flight" adventure Tom Swift in Captivity; or, A Daring Escape by Airship (1912) was bylined, like all Tom Swift adventures, Victor Appleton. Most of the early ones, including this, were the work of Howard Garis, a gifted writer despite the speed with which he pumped out series books for sundry age groups. The thrilling dustwrapper is the work of H. R. Boehm, depicting a biplane buzzing the village of Patagonian Lost Race of giants ten feet tall.

Here's the first edition dustwrapper for Ganpat's lost race rarity The Voice of Daishin, A Romance of Wild Mountains (New York: Doran, 1927). The jacket describes it thus: "A highly romantic quest leading to adventure, suspense, horror and true love along the mysterious reaches of the Tibetan hills, which gives in fiction form the novelist-explorer's knowledge of this gigantic background. There is the drama of unknown nature in the glacial passes of the North Indian Mountains. Mystic prophesies, man-hunting tribes, the city of Fairy Towers, add color to a tale of a land little known & vastly mysterious."

A. Hyatt Verrill wrote a handful of jungle adventure stories with rather tentative lost race elements, but Carib Gold is a tale of hidden pirate treasure. Perhaps the most interesting innovation in this effort is Verrill's use of a girl as central protagonist. Martha, knicknamed "Jimmy," accompanied her archeologist uncle, all but transforming a typical boys' adventure into an atypical girls' adventure.

An art nouveau decorative binding with floral design is a little out of place on an adventure fantasy, but lovely even so. St. George Rathborne's A Goddess of Africa: A Story of the Golden Fleece (1897) borrows a little from the Argonauts but in a late-Victorian setting. A tale of witchcraft and of a lost race deep in Africa, the story is more than commonly imitative of H. Rider Haggard from the title onward.

Herbert Strang was a popular young adult novelist whose books were frequently given thrilling bindings. The Heir of a Hundred Kings (1930) takes advantage of the dreamy popularity of Egyptology, reassuring the reader that the classical high Egyptian culture really does survive out there in the unchartable desert.