In 1908 a dying man told Willis George Emerson that he had sailed through an opening at the North Pole into a lit world beneath our own, and lived among the people there for two years. He was not the first to make the claim, and he would not be the last.

Before the hollow earth became a punchline it was a serious proposition — argued in print, dictated by spirits, and mapped in fiction by writers who more than half believed it. This collection gathers the four books that built the idea, including the strangest American novel of the nineteenth century.

The Smoky God — Emerson's account of Olaf Jansen, who sailed north with his father and did not stop where the map did.

Etidorhpa, or the End of the Earth — John Uri Lloyd's masterpiece of subterranean initiation. A man is taken underground by a faceless guide and shown the machinery of the world. Read 'Aphrodite' backwards.

A Dweller on Two Planets — dictated, its author insisted, by a Tibetan adept to a teenage boy in California. Atlantis, Lemuria, air-ships and karma, decades before any of it was fashionable.

The Iron Republic — a lost civilisation inside the earth that solved the problems we are still arguing about, found by a shipwrecked sailor in the southern ocean.

Read by Graham Dunlop. Four complete and unabridged works.