Fantasy Howard, Robert E.: Savage Stories of Conan, v 3, 25 Aug 2011

[Jellby]

Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. His most known creation is probably the character of Conan the Cimmerian, which contributed establishing the genre of sword-and-sorcery fantasy.

I've created here a collection of all freely available original Conan stories by Howard. The stories are ordered by publication date, but I've also included a chronological (in-story time) list, and at the end of each story there is a link to the next one (if you want to read them in publication order, ignore the link and page forward).

Unfortunately, one of the stories, "The Vale of Lost Women", seems to be still under copyright in Canada (it was first published less than 50 years ago), but it is copyright-free in the US (it has apparently not been renewed). If you are in a country where all stories are copyright-free (as in most of the EU, I believe), you can replace the file "OEBPS/Book-22-01.xhtml" inside the .epub with the version in the US server (see readme.html), just make sure it stays in the correct directory inside the .epub.

At the end there is an essay about the Hyborian Age, the fictitious historical and geographical setting of the stories, and there is also a map (it's rotated throug SVG, I hope it works in the different ePUB readers).

The titles use embedded fonts, which I think look pretty good and appropriate

The source for the texts is mainly Project Gutenberg Australia. I've made some corrections and changes for consistency. For those wanting to read this in a web browser, I include an index.zip file: just unzip this and the .epub file in the same directory, and open index.html (and modify index.css if you like).

As usual, all comments are welcome.

EDIT (v2): Fixed a wrong chapter link and updated to support the epub2pdf script.

EDIT (v3): Added the three missing stories.

(previous download count: 1297)

File located off-site. To report a copyright violation you can contact us here.

[atidball]

Looks great, but isn't the cover under copyright? Who is the artist?

BTW, the cover doesn't show up with my calibre viewer (v0.5.14).

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by atidball

Looks great, but isn't the cover under copyright? Who is the artist?

I don't know, actually. It was the cover in the upload by Spellbot 5000. All I did was finding a better version online, apparently it's from some video game (search "conan video game" in google images).

I tried finding some free Conan image, but couldn't find anything I liked, so I sticked with what had been already published here. But other suggestions are welcome.

BTW, the cover doesn't show up with my calibre viewer (v0.5.14).

I think that's because of the SVG wrapper to make it adapt to the screen size. It works in ADE and in Calibre's cover browser, as far as I know.

[Dave Berk]

Thanks a lot!!!

Snatched!

[K-Thom]

Jellby, this is rather walking on thin ice, using both the cover and "Conan" logo which are definitely under copyright worldwide. As for the photo, that should be out of copyright by now, but Conan Properties Inc. might have registered it as a picture mark - since it is the most well-known photo of Howard -, so this might cause problems, too.

Aside from this the links aren't working in Stanza on my iPhone. Works fine in ADE though.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by K-Thom

Jellby, this is rather walking on thin ice...

I know, I know... just don't tell anyone

(Cover and "logo" were taken from the previous version of this book, which wasn't uploaded by me, picture and map are from Wikipedia.)

Aside from this the links aren't working in Stanza on my iPhone. Works fine in ADE though.

That's a problem of Stanza, I'd say, there's nothing special in the links.

[Jellby]

I realized a chapter was linked incorrectly. The content was there, but it was only accessible through the toc links, normal page turning would give another duplicated chapter instead.

I fixed this and also updated the file to make it work with the epub2pdf script. Uploaded v2.

[weedfreak]

The problem of the cover, and the map I found, not appearing in Calibre can be solved by right clicking the image and selecting reload.

[Mrgauth]

Just grabbed this and it looks awesome. Thanks so much. I found a hard copy of all of these at Barnes and Noble today for $13 that looks very very nice and almost bought it. But this is better. Thanks.

[Jellby]

I could find the three missing stories online, and added them to the compilation. Unfortunately, one of the stories, "The Vale of Lost Women", seems to be still under copyright in Canada, see the first post. Uploaded v3.