I found it at a thrift shop, Dover reprint, and I picked it up because when I was a kid I was crazy for this sort of stuff.
By the time I was 12 I'd read almost the entire children's library, and some of the books that I hadn't included Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I knew who Tarzan was, of course, who doesn't? But I wasn't that interested. Nonetheless, it was getting down to Tarzan or nothing, so I checked out a few of the books.
And I loved them...
I mean, I read everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Tarzan books, the John Carter on Mars, the Moon Maidens, Tarzan at the Earth's Core, I'm pretty sure the library didn't have them all, but what they had, I read.
I loved 'em all.
So when I got to be twenty-ish I revisited them. Specifically Tarzan. And I found them painful, awkward to read, horrible, just appalling...
I blame my fancy highbrow European tastes, I'd been reading the English authors, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maughm, George Orwell, any number of other authors, Vladimir Nabokov...clearly I was raising the bar...
When I had my son, perhaps when he was 10 or 12, I gave him a couple of dozen original dime-store Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books I'd found at a garage sale. He pretended to try and read and then discarded, they weren't to his taste, what can you do?
But finding this, the Dover reprint, slender, the adventures of David Innes and company at the Earth's core, I couldn't resist. I'd try him again.
And, a slender book, filled with original, novel ideas, poorly executed and even more poorly recorded...psychological gold, this, the primitive, stone age and reptilian races at the earth's core, the beast-man named "Gr-gr-gr", the thags and dinosaurs, the inwardly curving horizon and the stationary hovering moon, but, like Gaston Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera" it's also literary torture. The brilliant device of the author addressing a letter of criticism from a fan at the beginning (who turns to a believer when he sees the evidence the author provides) is undermined by it's execution, and perhaps it's wrong of me to judge as Burroughs himself never aspired to be more than a pulp-fiction writer, in any case, intriguing for the ideas, and he did have some great ideas, but for the most part these books will have to remain in memory and childhood...