Eight stories and a slab of invented prehistory, bound in hardcover for readers who until then had chased these characters through a pulp magazine. Gnome Press published the collection in the United States in 1953, and Boardman Books brought it to Britain the following year. The stories themselves first ran in Weird Tales during the 1930s.

Two of Robert E. Howard's heroes share the covers: Kull, and Conan the Cimmerian, the wandering swordsman who gave sword and sorcery its shape. "The Tower of the Elephant" sits among the Conan tales here. Howard also supplied the first part of "The Hyborian Age", a pseudo-history of the vanished world his fiction occupies, written in the flat voice of a scholar piecing together migrations, kingdoms and the collapse of both. Reading the adventures against that chronicle is the point of the book. The fights land harder once you can see the map of dead empires behind them.

This particular assembly never reached paperback. Publishers broke it up instead and scattered its contents through later Kull and Conan collections, so most readers met these stories in pieces, under other covers. The 1953 hardcover survives as a collector's item and as the first serious attempt to present Howard's magazine work as a body of writing rather than a run of back issues.