James Hilton (novelist) picked "Lost Horizon" as its first title in 1939. For that reason, the novel is frequently called the book that began the "paperback revolution." Hilton is said to have been inspired to write "Lost Horizon", and to invent "Shangri-La" by reading the "National Geographic Magazine" articles of Joseph Rock, an Austrian-American botanist and ethnologist exploring the southwestern Chinese provinces and Tibetan borderlands. Still living in Britain at the time, Hilton was perhaps influenced by the Tibetan travel articles of early travellers in Tibet whose writings were found in the British Library. Christian Zeeman, the Danish father of the mathematician Christopher
Lost Horizon called the first American paperback book, when in fact paperbacks had been around since the mid-1800s. What made Pocket Book #1 of revolutionary importance was that it was the first "mass-market" paperback; mass market paperbacks allowed people of modest means not only to own books they otherwise could not afford but also to slip the paperback into their pocket for casual reading on the go, hence the name "Pocket Book". By the 1960s, Pocket Books alone, over the course of more than 40 printings, had sold several million copies of "Lost Horizon", helping to make it one of the most