Gnome Project

From: The Great Gnome Press Science
Fiction Odyssey

"Hard to believe today, but before World War II not a single mainstream publisher in America would publish a genre science fiction or fantasy novel. H. G. Wells had once been so fanatically popular that publishers would pirate his works if they couldn’t get them legitimately, but the coming of the pulp magazine era destroyed the reputation of the field. Science fiction was written by subliterates for subliterates, or so went the opinion of the literary world.

From: The Great Gnome Press Science
Fiction Odyssey

     The forceful introduction to the Atomic Era in 1945 may have made those crazy Buck Rogers ideas a bit more respectable, but not to publishing. Mysteries sold in the millions, westerns remained popular, and romances had steady sales but fantasy and science fiction couldn’t even get a foothold in the paperback world, let alone mainstream hardbacks of the type sold in bookstores….

From: Modern Mechanix

    In its first five years, Gnome would publish Robert Heinlein’s Sixth Column, The Sands of Mars and Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and the three volumes of the Foundation trilogy, Clifford M. Simak’s award-winner City and his Cosmic Engineers, reprints of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, and works by L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Williamson, C. L. Moore, A. E. van Vogt, Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner, Hal Clement and half a dozen others. That’s Golden Age science fiction in a nutshell."
— The Gnome Press Release
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