[King Solomon's Mines] was first published in September 1885 amid considerable fanfare, with billboards and posters around London announcing "The Most Amazing Book Ever Written".
Reading King Solomon's Mines today is like watching an Indiana Jones movie without the special effects. It's packed with the conventions of its genre (the old fooling-the-natives-with-an-eclipse trick, getting stuck in a cave after the big stone door has unexpectedly crashed shut, finding the light at the end of the tunnel, etc.), many of which conventions made their first appearance in Sir H. Rider Haggard's book, and certain Victorian customs and attitudes therein will perhaps be uncomfortable to the modern reader, but still it remains an entertaining yarn for boys young and old and, as H.G. Wells once said of another book, women of the better sort.
Movies based on King Solomon's Mines were made in 1950, 1985, and 2004, if you want to get all Netflixy about the thing, and the book itself is available free from Apple's iBooks, gutenberg.org (see also the link in the books list) and lots of other places, no doubt.
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