I was thinking things Howardian the other day and realized that the DMR Books blog had never given a shout-out to the Howard Works website. Like Roy Glashan’s Library, we’ve linked to it again and again in days gone by. It’s time to make things right and give Howard Works its due.

The genesis of Howard Works stretches back for a quarter-century, all the way to the late Nineties when the Internet was still the Wild West, a barbaric chaos slowly coalescing into the highly-regulated cyberscape we have now. There was no Google and Robert E. Howard fans had to walk many rocky, winding paths when they searched for REH bibliographical info.

That is where Todd A. Woods comes in. I'll let him tell it in his own words:

This [the Howard Works website] is my attempt to create the listing I wish would have been available when I started my Howard collection. While I've found most of this information available in different places, I've yet to find all this info in one place. I decided to create a set of web pages that lists the contents of each book containing Howard stories. I had been building my personal collection using the Marek listing contained in Cromlech #3. While this list is excellent, it doesn't include all appearances of each story. I wanted to know where everything was.
In 1998, I went to the Howard celebration in Cross Plains where I met several Howard fans and scholars, including Paul Herman. I spent a wonderful Saturday afternoon riding in Paul's van with Paul, Scotty Henderson and Jack Baum. Jack gave us a tour of the Cross Plains area, sharing personal reminiscences about when he grew up in the area. He also took us to East Caddo Peak atop which he was certain Howard himself had once looked out over the surrounding area. The point of this is that as I talked to these guys (and others), I decided I should do something with the knowledge I had learned collecting Howard's fiction. Thus the book content listings.
Early in 1999, Paul mentioned he had an electronic listing of Howard's fiction, published and unpublished. He asked me to share any info I had on the paperback collections. I have all but a couple of the Howard paperbacks printed in English. Seeing Paul's list, it screamed "WEB PAGE!" to me. With Paul's permission to use his list, I made the decision to get serious about doing a web page containing his list, my book pages, and a story list similiar to Marek's. After a year of work, slipped between the job and home, this is it. I hope you find it useful.
— Todd A. Woods April 2000

The 'Paul Herman' he refers to is one of the unsung movers n' shakers of REH fandom these past thirty years. I need to do a post on Paul and his landmark book, The Neverending Hunt, at some point.

Howard Works became indispensable to Howard scholars and collectors like me. Not only could you learn about editions you didn't know about, you could discover stories/poems/whatever that you didn't even know existed. A true digital treasure-trove.

With the minor explosion of REH publishing that began in the early aughts--and continues, to a certain extent, even now--the upkeep of the site finally became more than Todd wanted to handle. The torch was passed to the indefatigable Bill Thom, already the proprietor of the pulp-centric Coming Attractions website.

Thom took to his sacred task with his usual competence and diligence. Howard Works remains, to this day, the definitive bibliographical REH resource on the Webz. ISFDB is good, but Howard Works is better.