'King Solomon's Mines, The Companion Edition' Presents Haggard's Complete 1885 Text, the Original Lost-World Adventure, with the Narrator's Own Introduction Restored and Thirty Discussion Questions Fenced Until Umbopa's Secret Is the Book's to Tell

King Solomon's Mines, The Companion Edition Presents Haggard's Complete 1885 Text, the Original Lost-World Adventure, with the Narrator's Own Introduction Restored and Thirty Discussion Questions Fenced Until Umbopa's Secret Is the Book's to Tell

The first-edition book, Dedication, Quatermain's Introduction, and twenty chapters, collated against a scan of Cassell's 1887 "Thirty-seventh Thousand" impression, with explainers on the map, the country, and the legend

NEW YORK, Oct. 31, 2026, In the autumn of 1885, Cassell & Company of London published a romance its twenty-eight-year-old author had written at speed, by his own later account after a small wager that he could match *Treasure Island*: an elephant hunter's plain record of a journey made for a lost brother, guided by a map a Portuguese adventurer had drawn in his own blood on a fragment of linen three centuries before. H. Rider Haggard's *King Solomon's Mines* was a runaway success, the Cassell impression collated for this edition already calls itself the "Thirty-seventh Thousand", and it fixed the pattern of the lost-world adventure for a century of imitators. A new Companion Classics edition, King Solomon's Mines, The Companion Edition, presents the complete novel, 81,739 words, the narrator's Introduction and all twenty chapters, unabridged, in the text of the 1885 first-edition book, taken from Project Gutenberg eBook #2166 and collated against an Internet Archive scan of Cassell's 1887 impression (the two cleanly bounded chapters agree at 0.924-0.927 token agreement; a 120-probe test across all twenty chapters matched at 66.7% against the scan's unusually noisy OCR, every spot-checked miss resolving to OCR misreading or to one of two small wording variants, both logged in the edition's provenance note).

The story itself is the foundation stone of its genre: Allan Quatermain, a fifty-five-year-old hunter who prices everything, is hired by Sir Henry Curtis to find Curtis's lost brother beyond the desert; Captain Good, R.N., comes for the walk; a Zulu servant named Umbopa engages himself for no wages and asks to come along; and the road runs through thirst and an ancient causeway to a hidden kingdom, a one-eyed king, a witch-hunt, a war for a throne, and the Place of Death. This edition prints the book as it first stood: Haggard's later Author's Note of 1898 and Post Scriptum of 1907, transmitted by the Gutenberg text's 1907 source, are later-edition additions and are not printed; the narrator's Dedication and Introduction, which are part of the 1885 book, are.

Around the novel, the companion material, all of it original to this edition, includes an introduction on the wager, the six-week writing, and the book's slow conquest of a century; a Who's Who of eleven entries, from Quatermain and the Curtis brothers to Gagool, the keeper of the kings' secrets; four explainers, covering the map, the document, and the book's double frame of narrator and fictional Editor; the real southern Africa of the 1880s, Natal, the ivory trade, and the diamond fields; the expedition's arithmetic of money, guns, and loads; and the Solomon, Ophir, and Great Zimbabwe legend Haggard wove into fiction; a short life of H. Rider Haggard; a factual note on the period text; a reading schedule in four meetings; and thirty discussion questions, spoiler-fenced by meeting, so that Umbopa's secret and the fates of the party stay the book's to reveal.

Alongside the book, King Solomon's Mines, Book Club Kit offers the edition's discussion material as a printable PDF (26 pages, US Letter) for reading groups: the four-meeting plan, the Who's Who and explainers in full, all thirty discussion questions arranged by meeting, and Chart the Road, an Expedition Map & Ledger activity in which a group plots the journey station by station, setting what the map promised against what the ground showed. The kit is available for $7 through the editor's Payhip store: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr

King Solomon's Mines, The Companion Edition is available now as an eBook ($9.99) through Payhip: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr, and in The Classics and Companions Shop on the editor's Linktree. Print editions follow on Amazon (paperback, $14.99; hardcover, $24.99). The text is public domain in the United States and in life+70 countries (H. Rider Haggard died in 1925). The novel is a work of its period and is printed unaltered, with a factual period note in the edition describing its colonial-era language and depictions; no period term is used in this edition's own copy. No map or frontispiece is reproduced in this edition, no usable scan of the early editions' facsimile map was obtained, and the edition claims no map it does not contain; its cover is an original painting made for this edition. This is an independent publication, not affiliated with or endorsed by any film adaptation.

About the editor

Horace Harriott Jr. is a New York-based author and editor of more than two dozen books, including The Side Hustle Handbook, Master Playbook and The Ultimate Commissary Cookbook. This edition is part of his Companion Classics series of reading-together editions of public-domain classics.

About the book

King Solomon's Mines, The Companion Edition, H. Rider Haggard (author), Horace Harriott Jr. (editor). Companion Classics, independently published, October 2026. Text: the first edition (Cassell & Company, London, 1885), via Project Gutenberg eBook #2166, collated against an IA scan of Cassell's 1887 "Thirty-seventh Thousand" impression; the narrator's Introduction plus 20 chapters; 81,739 words; no map or frontispiece reproduced (see note above); interior proof 389 pages, 6 x 9 in.