# Is "The Sword of Conan" by Robert E. Howard a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of The Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard (Gnome Press, Inc., 1952) is identified by: The copyright page of this title states 'First Printing' (copyright registered 1 April 1952); it is the second Gnome Conan volume. The Gnome Press first edition, New York, 1952, is the true first in book form; the constituent stories had appeared in Weird Tales in the 1930s, which is a magazine appearance, not a competing book edition.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- The copyright page of this title states 'First Printing' (copyright registered 1 April 1952); it is the second Gnome Conan volume
- The binding is magenta/maroon cloth lettered in black, with David Kyle's colour pictorial Map of the World of Conan in the Hyborean Age as endpapers front and rear, and the dust jacket is by David Kyle with the artist credited at the front flap and the price present at the flap on an unclipped copy
- Contents are 'The People of the Black Circle', 'The Slithering Shadow', 'The Pool of the Black One' and 'Red Nails', all from Weird Tales (1933, 1934, 1936), each preceded by a biographical paragraph drawn from Miller and Clark's 'An Informal Biography of Conan the Cimmerian'
- The Gnome Press bibliography records no variant boards, no variant jacket and no later printing for this title, which materially reduces the usual Gnome reprint risk
- Sources conflict on pagination (251 vs 219) and print run (5,000 vs 4,000), so neither figure should be used as an identification point
- Publisher imprint reads Gnome Press, Inc.
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Robert E. Howard |
| Publisher | Gnome Press, Inc. |
| Year | 1952 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | The copyright page of this title states 'First Printing' (copyright registered 1 April 1952); it is the second Gnome Conan volume |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
The copyright page of this title states 'First Printing' (copyright registered 1 April 1952); it is the second Gnome Conan volume. The binding is magenta/maroon cloth lettered in black, with David Kyle's colour pictorial Map of the World of Conan in the Hyborean Age as endpapers front and rear, and the dust jacket is by David Kyle with the artist credited at the front flap and the price present at the flap on an unclipped copy. Contents are 'The People of the Black Circle', 'The Slithering Shadow', 'The Pool of the Black One' and 'Red Nails', all from Weird Tales (1933, 1934, 1936), each preceded by a biographical paragraph drawn from Miller and Clark's 'An Informal Biography of Conan the Cimmerian'. The Gnome Press bibliography records no variant boards, no variant jacket and no later printing for this title, which materially reduces the usual Gnome reprint risk. Sources conflict on pagination (251 vs 219) and print run (5,000 vs 4,000), so neither figure should be used as an identification point.

## Is this the true first?
The Gnome Press first edition, New York, 1952, is the true first in book form; the constituent stories had appeared in Weird Tales in the 1930s, which is a magazine appearance, not a competing book edition. There is no UK or original-language precedence question — Howard wrote in English and no earlier or simultaneous British edition of this collection is recorded. The census claim is confirmed.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club edition is documented for this title, and the Gnome Press bibliography lists no variants. The structural Gnome caveat still governs the imprint generally: with a single exception (The Carnelian Cube), Gnome never announced that it had reprinted a book and left the edition statement unchanged on the copyright page, and Greenberg bound only part of a run at a time, warehousing sheets and later binding them in whatever boards the printer had — eight second printings and one third printing are known across the imprint. Jacket back panels were updated to list the latest Gnome titles, so back-panel advertising is the customary cross-check. Later Lancer/Ace paperback recastings of the Conan canon are wholly different editions, not states of this book.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *The Sword of Conan* by Robert E. Howard a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/the-sword-of-conan
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.