Shambhala within the Soviet intelligence service, as well as rival efforts of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat that sent its own expedition to Tibet in 1924. French Buddhist Alexandra David-Néel associated Shambhala with Balkh in present-day Afghanistan, also offering the Persian "Sham-i-Bala", "elevated candle" as an etymology of its name. In a similar vein, the Gurdjieffian J. G. Bennett published speculation that Shambalha was "Shams-i-Balkh", a Bactrian sun temple. Shambhala may have been the inspiration for Shangri-La, a paradise on Earth hidden in a Tibetan valley, which features in the 1933 novel "Lost Horizon" by British author James Hilton. Shambhala In Hinduism
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