Violet Books

J. A. Lath's The Lost City of the Aztecs; or, The Mystery of the Hidden Crater (New York: Cupples & Leon, 1934). Under this exciting dustwrapper is a decorative binding with a demonic figurehead embossed black on bright red cloth; plus there's an action frontispiece. Four chums find a secret cipher stuck inside the binding of an old book written years before by a famed geologist. Once they have decoded the message, they set off to find the last remnant of Aztec high civilization hidden in an extinct crater in Arizona.

Though this specimen of a rare dustwrapper is a damaged, the beauty of the thrilling color pictorial is nevertheless evident. There's also an action frontispiece. Captain J. E. Gurdon's The Secret of the South (London: Warne, 1950) is about a lost race called the Polarians and the discovery in the Hollow Earth of yet another race, of Abominable Snowmen called "Anthropians" who possess an elaborate culture.

This is the Canadian first edition of David MacLean Parry's The Scarlet Empire (Toronto: McLeod & Allen [1906]). Besides the decorative binding there are also several spectacular color plates by Hermann C. Wall. This Lost Race dystopian romance is one of the finer books of its type. A young socialist overcome with ennui attempts suicide by drowning himself, but awakens on the seabottom's lost Atlantis where social democracy grants every man a living but limits every other expression of life.

Prisoners of Chance: The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, Through His Love for a Lady of France (Chicago: McClurg, 1908) by Randall Parrish is shown here in the first edition binding, a somewhat misleading "Gibson girl" type of portrait that implies a shopgirl romance -- causing many to miss this book when they're looking for fantasies. It's actually about the survival of Mound Builder culture in Louisiana, ruled by an Ayesha-like queen. The book also sports also four splendid color plates by the Kinneys.

World Syndicate Publishing of Cleveland, Ohio, did not indicate editions, but I believe this is the first edition dustwrapper, perhaps the handsomest that can be found on any juvenile lost race book, depicting an Inca priest before an idol. In The Mystery Boys and the Inca Gold by Van Powell (1931) classical Incas are discovered along with their hidden city and the Temple of the Sun.

I presume this slightly smaller format edition of Van Powell's The Mystery Boys and the Inca Gold (Cleveland, Ohio: World Syndicate, 1931) is a later issue though the publisher never indicates editions. Its completely different action-pictorial would seem rather splendid if the larger format edition hadn't been just about the coolest dustwrapper of all time.

The wild dustwrapper for Douglas V. Duff's The Sky-Pirates (London: Peal Press, n.d.) depicts an airborne fellow in rocket-man flying suit soaring on the spine, besides the rocket & airplane over tilled countryside. The tale combines fantastic inventions with the lost race motif. The Arabic/Sumarian cliffdwellers had not been exposed to the modern world for centuries -- until confronted by the savagery of crazed modern-day scientists. Pretty cool boys' adventure fantasy & one of the few boys' books to look at modern science as spiritually & morally inferior to the primitive.

Duff's The Sky-Pirates (London: Blackie, n.d. [1948]) was reissued with a completely redesigned dustwrapper despite that the design elements are the same: the pirates' rocket over an airplane, and pretty much the same rocket-man in flying suit on the spine. The pirates are an unscrupulous international cartel of nasty scientists whose hideout in the Syrian desert brings them into conflict with a lost race called The People of the Axe. This dustwrapper is by Dobson Broadhead who also provides three interior illustration plates exclusive to this edition.

"Ganpat" was the pseudonym of an Anglo-Indian author, of M. L. A. Comperte, who came by his name when Comperte proved unprounceable by East Indian friends. Ganpat like Talbot Mundy romanticized the secrets of the Himilayas, which he knew quite well. One of his scarcest lost race fantasies is Fairy Silver, A Traveller's Tale (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932) shown here in first edition dustwrapper, depicting an unexpected encounter between a modern mountaineer and a swordsman who has stepped out of the era of swashbucklers.

Here's the first edition dustwrapper for Ganpat's rare Mirror of Dreams, A Tale of Oriental Mystery (New York: Doubleday Doran,1928). Underneath the eerie pictorial by E. Walker is decorative cloth, a green Goddess embossed on orange cloth. The weird adventure fantasy is once again set in the Himilayas, incorporating such elements as prophetic dreams & dream-communication, occult powers, ghostly vision, mind-control, macabre Goddess cult, magic mirrors, & lost race's mysterious "force" lingering in their fabulous ruins. This is one of Ganpat's most extreme noves in terms of incident & is thought to have inspired James Hilton's classic Lost Horizon.

The first edition dustwrapper for S. Fowler Wright's Vengeance of Gwa (London: Books of Today, 1945) shows ape-men threatening a beautiful cave-maiden. Set in prehistoric times, this is a tale of the doomed missing link vs CroMagnon, adding also the motif of fantastic beasts.

This new edition of S. Fowler Wright's 1928 classic The Island of Captain Sparrow (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, n.d.) carries a new forword, added in 1950, by f/sf anthologist and editor Groff Conklin. It's a Lost Continent and Lost Race fantasy featuring a Pan-like, horned people, and a degenerate pirate-culture descended from a castaway eighteenth century pirate crew. Ev Bleiler in SF: The Early Years calls it "Interesting in idea, well-plotted, literate, imaginative," though faulting it for its plethora of author's asides.