Publisher's Synopsis
This collector-quality edition includes the complete text of the first of the three novels comprising Edgar Rice Burrough's "Caspak" trilogy, "The Land that Time Forgot", "The People that Time Forgot" and "Out of Time's Abyss," in a freshly edited and newly typeset edition. With a generous 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 page size, this Summit Classic Press edition is printed on hefty 60# bright white paper with a fully laminated cover featuring an original full color design. Additional original material created and presented for Burroughs' fans, new or old, are a biographical sketch of the author and a detailed bibliography of his work. "Caspak" is the native name for the island of Caprona, located somewhere in or near the Antarctic. Reported by the Italian explorer Caproni in 1721, the island's location was subsequently "lost". Both the island and the explorer are of course entirely fictional, and the island provides the setting for what has over the years become known as Edgar Rice Burroughs' science fiction "Caspak Trilogy." Originally published as a three-part serial in 1918, the three tales chronicle the adventures of the survivors of a torpedoed ship and the German u-boat crew on the lost island of "Caprona", and the members of the expedition that sets out to rescue the survivors. While the notion of a lost island replete with dinosaurs, neanderthals and assorted purely imaginary monsters may evoke thoughts of Doyle's "Lost World" or Verne's "Mysterious Island," Burroughs takes the story in a new direction, developing themes of evolution and personal metamorphosis. In Edgar Rice Burroughs' trademark style, the lost mariners are thrown into a series of non-stop adventures at a breakneck pace, with the Germans pitted against the British and American survivors, the humans pitted against dinosaurs and other monstrous creatures, and the modern castaways in conflict with the native inhabitants, themselves divided into groups at distinctly different human evolutionary stages and harboring a bizarre secret that dominates human life on the island. Later published as a novel under the title "The People That Time Forgot", the original three serial segments, clearly part of a single narrative, were subsequently published as three separate short novels in paperbacks widely available for many years, and that presentation became the norm, establishing the three stories as the "Caspak Trilogy." The complete Caspak trilogy is also available in a 6x9 format single-volume omnibus edition titled Caspak: The Complete Annotated Trilogy (ISBN-13: 978-1470071356), which is also annotated with the author's biography, bibliography, and introduction included in this title.
