The catalogue began with earlier REH World Stories records and Howard Works (howardworks.com) bibliographic evidence, then reconciled those records into stable Work and Textual Version identities. Publication records and Contents are supplied through the companion REH Publications catalogue.
Textual and Character research is expanded from reviewed source material, including:
- Howard’s surviving manuscripts, typescripts and carbons, together with documented TSS catalogue evidence;
- REH Foundation Press First Cuts volumes, which preserve draft and manuscript detail;
- REH Foundation Press Ultimate Editions, used as restored reading-edition witnesses for the practical final/final-submission state;
- original magazine, pulp and other publication texts when publication evidence is the available textual source;
- source notes, bibliographies and other reviewed research used to reconcile titles, dates, relationships and surviving states.
Source data is treated as evidence to be reviewed and reconciled, not as something to copy blindly. Documented manuscript holdings represented in these sources include material associated with the Glenn Lord collection at the University of Texas at Austin, the Robert E. Howard collection at Texas A&M University and the typescript collection at Cross Plains Library. A catalogue entry does not imply that every physical page has been directly inspected.