After rereading Doyle’s “The Lost World,” I decided to reread another Lost World tale, this one The Land that Time Forgot, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Unlike many boys my age, I never read any Edgar Rice Burroughs (or Hardy Boys for that matter) when I was young. Tarzan was familiar, of course, from television, the Gold Key comic books, and the newspaper comic strip by Russ Manning. But I was never tempted to pickup and read a Tarzan novel, or any Burroughs’ book. Even though they were on almost every shelf of books at school and at the houses of friends and cousins.

That changed somewhere in my 40s when I found a handful of Burroughs paperbacks at a thrift store for .25-cents a piece. I liked the covers and the price so I bought half a stack. The first Burroughs book I read was At the Earth’s Core. I quickly followed that with a couple more in the Pellucidir series. I then read the first couple Tarzan books and finally the first few John Carter of Mars books.

Those Burroughs books were Classic Adventure books. The Land That Time Forgot is as well. As a writer, Burroughs knows how to keep you turning pages. This is obviously not fine literature. It is good escapist entertainment though. If you go into it expecting that, you will not be disappointed. And I wasn’t on my second reading.

The Land that Time Forgot is about the survivors of a torpedoed British ship and their German U-boat captives during WWI stranded on Caspak, a hidden Antarctic continent where dinosaurs roam and human evolution progresses rapidly in different coexisting tribes.

It is a quick and fun read.

Some Odd/Favorite Lines From The Land That Time Forgot:

Narrator introducing Another Narrator: 
“You have read the opening paragraph, and if you are an imaginative idiot like myself, you will want to read the rest of it; so I shall give it to you here, omitting quotation marks—which are difficult of remembrance.  In two minutes you will forget me.”

Classic”Red-Scare” Lines:
“I am an I. W. W. I became a German agent—not because I love them, for I hate them too—but because I wanted to injure Americans, whom I hated more.”

Classic “Dope-Fiend” Line:
“Thinking the thoughts of a lunatic or a dope-fiend, I fell asleep…”