Its financial success led to the creation of several spin-off books about the same fictional creatures, as well as many other products, such as toys, clothing and games.

In the book, Huygen and Poortvliet say they've spent at least twenty years observing them and call their study the "first work of consequence on the subject to be published since Wunderlich's bulky and dubious treatise De Hominibus Parvisimis appeared in 1580".

The gnomes also used to live in society alongside humans, especially in Europe, but due to pollution and deforestation they've slowly retreated to their secret homes.

According to Adams and van Straten, the protagonist of the book embodies the "shared world view and values" of the authors: the gnomes revere nature and are tempered creatures.

For Siehl, one of the most important aspects of those books was how they represented the natural world: "the style is so subtle, so effective, that most standard approaches to the subject matter will never match it."

[4]: 929 Additionally, the gnomes in the book are based on the Dutch "kabouter", a word that was also associated at the time to a "nascent environmental movement" happening in Amsterdam.

[8] Ian Ballantine, who worked for Abrams at the time, was in a Dutch airport when he received a copy of the book, and immediately loved the idea.

Lingeman also noted that the gnomes, although somewhat similar in design to the Seven Dwarves, do not share Disney's "manipulative cuteness", and instead are closer to drawings of nature.

[11] In a review for the Los Angeles Times, Jack Smith described Gnomes as "one of those remarkable books which represent an author's almost obsessive dedication to a single subject".

Smith also commented on the writing, saying that it was able to "lift above the tedious" present in some of the less interesting sections of the book, such as when the internal organs of the gnomes are described.

[19] In 1987, a spin-off of the show based on the books, La llamada de los gnomos (English: Wisdom of the Gnomes) was released.