The bulk of the text was written by Teresa Patterson based on notes and information provided by Jordan, who also serves as overall editor on the project.
While the information in the guide is broadly canonical, the book is deliberately written with vague, biased, or even downright false (or guessed) information in places, as Patterson felt this would reflect a key theme of the series (the mutability of knowledge across time and distance).
Some additional fans, citing poor quality of the internal illustrations, have dubbed the volume "The Big Book With Bad Art".
On 6 June 2002 Orbit re-released the book as a 461-page mass-market paperback, stripped of all illustrations apart from the maps.
The original large-editions of the book were presented with full-colour art by Todd Cameron Hamilton and includes maps by Ellisa Mitchell, John M. Ford and Thomas Canty.