Black Library Hall of Fame honors 2007 books, opens 2008 voting

The Black Library canon fight just moved another year forward. Goonhammer’s May 2 Hall of Fame update locked in the 2007 winners and opened voting for class of 2008, keeping a long-running reader project alive as a public argument over which Warhammer novels still deserve to sit at the center of 40k reading culture.

That is the point of the Hall of Fame: it is not a simple popularity contest. The project is built to recognize books with “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance” to Black Library, using both committee votes and public polls, with committee members rotated over time so the list does not freeze around one taste or one generation. In practice, it has become a living archive, one that asks a question every other week as it moves through the back catalogue: which era actually set the tone for everything that came after?

The answer keeps circling back to the late 1990s and early 2000s. Goonhammer has already called the 1999-2000 class a “per-capita powerhouse,” pointing to foundational reads like Space Wolf, First & Only, and Trollslayer. It also noted that 2004 produced far more books than that earlier stretch, a reminder that the line’s influence is not just about a few famous titles but about whole bursts of publication that helped define the setting’s voice. For readers trying to decide where to start with older Black Library, that matters more than nostalgia alone. The Hall of Fame is drawing a map of the books people still recommend because they still shape how the universe is read.

The current version of that map also shows how the project has changed hands. Goonhammer’s April 18 installment introduced Arbitor Ian, described as a London-based content creator, lore historian, and prominent voice in the international Warhammer community, alongside Jordan Sorcery, a Warhammer historian known for documentary videos and interviews about Games Workshop’s development history. Goonhammer said Jordan Sorcery’s GW Book Club project, reading the original Warhammer GW Books & Boxtree releases in order, was nearly complete. That kind of stewardship gives the Hall of Fame real weight, especially after Games Workshop’s earlier 2016 Black Library Hall of Fame ended within a year after selecting just nine books.

The result is a sharper read on Black Library’s history than a simple best-of list. The 2007 winners add another layer, the 2008 ballot invites another round of disagreement, and the project keeps pressing the same larger point: the fiction side of Warhammer is not a shelf of dead backlist, it is the record of which stories still define the way fans talk about the setting.