Adelbert Kline, also died and his agency was bought by Oscar J. Friend. New collections Also in 1946, a collection of stories called Skull-Face and Others was released by August Derleth and his publishing company Arkham House. This book was reviewed by Hoffman Reynolds Hays in the New York Times Book Review under the title "Superman on a Psychotic Bender." Hays' review was flawed, bearing little relation to Howards' work, and he was the first critic to make ill-considered claims about Howard's life and sanity. Another book was published in 1950, this time a hardback version of the Conan novel "The Hour of the Dragon" re-titled as Conan the Conqueror. Martin Greenberg, owner of Gnome Press and a fan of Howard from the Weird Tales days, had approached Oscar Friend with a proposal for hardback reprints of all the Conan series. Conan the Conqueror was successful enough for the remaining five books in the series to go into production. The series, however, was not as much of a success and by the late 1950s the books could be found selling for just 50 cents. Conan the Conqueror also displayed another early example of a trend in Howard publishing, in the introduction editor and Howard fan John D. Clark wrote "Don't look for hidden philosophical meanings or intellectual puzzles in these yarns–they aren't there." This claim would later be refuted by Howard scholars. The editor of the later Gnome Press editions was the prominent science-fiction and fantasy writer L. Sprague de Camp. Friend had written to Dr. Kuykendall in February 1954 stating that the Conan property was too valuable to allow to simply come to an end with the final Gnome Press book. He suggested commissioning new Conan stories from a new writer, to which Kuykendall agreed. After editing some previously unpublished Howard-written Conan stories, de Camp wrote the new stories to be inserted into the now "official" timeline (based on a fan letter to Howard written by John D. Clark and P. Schuyler Miller in 1936). He subsequently converted unpublished non-Conan stories by Howard into Conans, for example the Crusades-era "Hawks over Egypt" was converted into the Conan story "Hawks over Shem." He also converted the pirate story "Swords of the Red Brotherhood" into the Conan story "The Treasure of Tranicos" despite the fact that it had been originally written by Howard as the Conan story "The Black Stranger," re-writing