Me and Howard

My name is Ståle Gismervik and I’m a Howardholic… I guess that is the fact.

It all started with discovering Conan around 1990 when I was 17. It was the first of a new wave of Conan releases—a Norwegian comic book (100 pages in B&W issued monthly). There were monthly issues of Conan then and I was hooked. Not much later I discovered one singular issue of SSoC (#116) at a local shop selling used comic books. I also had a classmate who gave me one of his brother’s issues from 1984 or -85 when Conan was first released as its own comic book in Norway.

When I went to Oslo (the capital of Norway) to study I also discovered there were books about Conan and the first ones I found were the books from Tor publications. I collected and read all I could find. This wasn’t close to Howard as I later found out. I must have seen that horrible Genghis Kahn movie with Arnold in it (it has nothing to do with Robert E. Howard’s Conan), but I didn’t like it then and I kind of hate it by now.

In the beginning, there was only Conan. The Internet was relatively new and I created one of the world’s very first and very soon largest Conan website. I started this when I got my internet connection in 1995. For several years I enjoyed running the Conan website and had people visiting from all over the world. Many of these are still active in the Howard community today and you can find them in various Facebook groups.

It wasn’t very long before I regretted what I had done. I don’t know what hurt the most, the domain name or my collection. I sold it way too cheap and now I had almost nothing left. Later I discovered that I had some Conan plastic toys, letter openers, and even a few posters.

I can’t remember exactly when and it doesn’t make quite sense since what actually caught my interest again was Dark Horses Conan comics. Marvel lost the right to publish them and a new artist, Cary Nord, got my attention. Slowly I started building my comic book collection anew but also starting more focus on books. 

In early 2016 I discovered The REH Foundation and became a member of the ‘Legacy Circle’. I also went overboard on eBay (and haven’t really stopped since) at the same time. By June 2016 I purchased the complete series of The Savage Sword of Conan (1-235) in very fine/near mint. Finding books and comics on eBay and other places has taken years and lots of money. I still collect, but I don’t buy every single paperback anymore.

Since my rediscovery of Conan and especially Robert E. Howard, I have read most of his stories, letters, and what’s written about him. There is still more to read and more to collect, but as long as I enjoy it, I’ll keep doing it. Passion is all that drives me. If I lose that I’ll stop.

I’ve wanted to do a website about Robert E. Howard for years but always found it hard to get started. I obtained the domain name reh.world over a year before these pages got started. I finally got the guts and started during Christmas 2020 and launched it on New Year’s Eve the same year. 

This website is dedicated to Robert E. Howard, his works, and his characters. I hope it will continue to grow.

I want to thank everyone (in no particular order) who has contributed to my website and my other projects

• Manuel Burón for providing PDF-files of some pulp magazines.
• Mathieu Gagnon for invaluable help correcting many of my mistakes and providing information for the stories.
• Rusty Burke for providing help with information on the Museum, the short biography about REH and lots more
• Dierk Günther for his professor skills and being extremely helpful with my articles and allowing me to use his article on my website. He is a good friend.
• Paul Herman for letting me work as the webmaster for the REH Foundation and REH Foundation Press websites and allowing me to create the new Ultimate Edition books. He is always too busy to answer all my questions. We’ve emailed a lot. Thanks also for inviting us to the barbeque in your house in 2022 when we visited Texas for the first time. I’ll never forget that.
• Fredrik Malmberg and Joakim (Jay) Zetterberg for being very helpful regarding questions and letting me do all these projects.
• Patrice Louinet for helping me out with questions, and source material. Takes a few weeks to get a reply from him, but it’s worth it.
• Rob Roehm for helping me out with my many questions, and source material. He has the shortest emails ever and is always on the run, but has been extremely helpful.
• John Bullard for doing the Collected Letters and his work around the voting system. Met him in 2022. Great guy.
• Bobby Dee for meeting me with a smile and a free book when we first arrived at Howard Days in 2022. He has done a lot of volunteer work and is always helpful and friendly.
• Bill Cavalier for selling me many of his fanzines, allowing me to call him Uncle Bill, and forcing me to stand on Robert E. Howard’s porch reading Cimmeria in Norwegian when we first arrived in Cross Plains.
• Bill Thom for his wonderful and extreme work on HowardWorks.com. Without that information, my website wouldn’t be as complete as it is today.
• Dennis McHaney for being the grumpiest man I know (except myself). Lots of great emails and information. Never met him yet.
• Arlene Stephenson for being the first one we met in Cross Plains. She guided us on a special tour in the Museum the first day we arrived just having seen me posting about it on Facebook. Wonderful woman.
• Ed Chazyk for being my Facebook friend and correcting my mistakes and providing information and questions.
• Jim and Ruth Keegan for letting me do one of the first articles on my website, an interview.
• Lee Breakiron for providing valuable information and correcting mistakes.
• Mark Finn for asking me to supply images for postcards to the Museum. Also for helping me get source material for the boxing eBooks.
• Mark Wheatley for always supplying me with covers for the Foundation books. Never seen an artist work as fast as he does.
• Neil Mechem for helping me out regarding the article about Girasol, one of my very first articles for the site.
• Scotty Henderson for actually having saved my old Conan website. Also for providing me with dozens of pulp magazines in digital format. He is the sole reason I have all of the Weird Tales magazines available for download here on my website.
• The late Rick Lai for allowing me to use his article about El Borak.
• Glenn Lord for preserving so much of Howard’s writings.
• Robert E. Howard for igniting my interest and passion.
• My wife for being so patient and tolerating my extreme hobby. I love you!

I have most likely forgotten many. Let me know if you feel left out. My mind works in mysterious ways. Anyway, thank you to all who have helped out and all who take the time to visit. Crom doesn’t care, but I do.

In August 2021 I started helping out Paul Herman with the REH Foundation website and the REHF Press website. This is an ongoing project where I have taken the role of webmaster.

In January 2024 I started working on creating eBooks of the REH Foundation books. This turned out to be a quite personal project since it might take the Foundation a while to keep up with the digital world. There’s lots of interest for eBooks. I didn’t really want an eBook reader myself, but the Heroic Signatures new pastiche Conan, El Borak, Solomon Kane and other stories forced me to buy a Kindle Scribe. It turned out it was fun to read on (I still prefer a physical book) and when I got the digital file for the new Swords of the North I just started editing it as an eBook. So far I’ve done 16 complete books.

In July 2024 I was getting impatient waiting for the new editions of REH Foundation Press’ Ultimate Editions. The projects had more or less halted and postponed for various reasons. On July 17th, 2024 I sent an email to Rob Roehm and Paul Herman asking if I could have a go at both the publishing issues and also creating the books themselves. For a couple of weeks I started figuring out the process of how to build a book from scratch, automating the process as best I can as I went along and set up an account at the printer/distributor. Now I can put together a book, providing I have all the source material which I get from Paul Herman, in less than a day. As of August 24th the first book I’ve put together, Spicy Adventures is scheduled to be available on August 30th all over the world, in hardcover, softcover and as an eBook.

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This document was last updated on August 24, 2024.