Conan (Gnome Press) Books in Order

The Gnome Press Conan books matter because they were the first real hardcover life for Conan after the original magazine appearances.

Published in the 1950s, this line gathered the Howard material known at the time and organized it into books meant to suggest an internal chronology. That was a big shift. Conan was no longer just a set of scattered pulp stories. He was starting to look like a bookshelf hero.

But the line is also a historical artifact, not a clean definitive text. Some volumes included stories revised or completed by L. Sprague de Camp. One volume, The Return of Conan, was a continuation by other hands. Another, Tales of Conan, drew on non-Conan Howard stories that had been reworked into Conan adventures. So the Gnome books are important, but they are not pure Howard from end to end.

That mix is part of what makes them interesting. You can see the moment when editors and publishers were trying to turn a dead pulp writer's scattered character into a lasting fantasy property. Sometimes that meant preservation. Sometimes it meant invention.

This page helps keep those threads straight. It shows the order of the Gnome books, what kind of material each one contains, and why the line still matters to readers and collectors. If you want the first great book-era Conan experiment, this is it.