Lost Horizon old, the doctor had told Rutherford, "Most old of anyone I have ever seen," implying that it was Lo-Tsen, aged drastically by her departure from Shangri-La. The narrator wonders whether Conway can find his way back to his lost paradise. The book, published in 1933, caught the notice of the public only after Hilton's "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" was published in 1934. "Lost Horizon" became a huge popular success and in 1939 was published in paperback form, as Pocket Book #1. Because of its number-one position in what became a very long list of pocket editions, "Lost Horizon" is often mistakenly
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