# - Hilton, James.

in purple ink, with erasures, overwritings and corrections in a print hand (probably autograph) in black ink, scattered revisions throughout in blue pencil, and corrections and notations in pencil, apparently marking up the text for the press, the first c.40 pages only, manuscript title page, 253 numbered pages, 4to, [April to September 1933], in a chemise and blue morocco backed solander box, lacking about 5 pages at the end of the epilogue, paper browned and fragile, some minor smudging, professionally restored

'The Papers of James Hilton', Christie's Los Angeles, 18 November 1999, lot 83

John R. Hummond, Lost Horizon Companion (Jefferson, NC, 2008)

Condition is described in the main body of the catalogue, where appropriate.
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corrected typescript of hilton's hugely successful novel, one of the most compelling fantasies of the twentieth century and the origin of "shangri-la". The novel was published in 1933, but this tale of western travellers discovering a place of tranquility high in the Himalayas still resonates today. The cast of characters even includes a financier on the run: having ruined his investment company "monkeying on Wall Street" at the time of the crash, Chalmers Bryant (or Barnard, as he calls himself) is overjoyed to find himself in a remote lamasary far from any stock market. Hilton won the Hawthornden Prize in 1934 and this award, together with the immediate success of Hilton's next book Goodbye Mr Chips, brought the novel to a massive audience. Lost Horizon has become a film (in 1937, directed by Frank Capra, and again in 1973) and a musical, but the concept of Shangri-La caught the popular imagination even more widely: it has given its name to the US Presidential retreat (now Camp David), a chain of hotels, a band, several songs, and even an aircraft carrier.

the text provided here does not correspond to either the first british or first american editions of the novel, which were published simultaneously in september 1933. The typescript was produced from a text that corresponded almost exactly to the first English edition of the novel but with the original title, Blue Moon. Once complete, this copy was then corrected against the exemplar with mistakes erased and overwritten in ink, probably by Hilton himself. The text was then revised, the revisions being made in blue pencil. The revisions are fairly light, and although some are improvements to the flow of the text, most were evidently made to adapt the novel to an American market: "petrol" is changed to "gasolene" [sic] and  "gramophone" to "phonograph", "a loonie" is instead "off his nut", and an offer to "make up a bridge four" becomes an suggestion to "play a couple of hands of bridge". A particular focus in revision was on the words spoken by Barnard, the central American character, apparently to make his speech more believable to a US readership. His frequent use of the word "reckon", is toned down by varying it with "guess", "suppose", or "bet".

The nature of these revisions strongly suggests that they were carried out on the instruction of the novel's American publisher, William Morrow, and given the presence of the original title on the typescript it must have been with Morrow before 11 May 1933, when Hilton determined on the change of title (Hummond, p.17). This is confirmed by the fact that Blue Moon is crossed out in Morrow's blue pencil. The revisions found here were by and large incorporated into the American edition, but additional changes were made to the text before publication, including revisions to the novel's first sentence and elsewhere (Hummond, p.75). These later revisions may well explain why the marking off of galleys on this typescript was abandoned after about 40 pages.