The book was originally called Nameless Cults by Robert E. Howard in his stories "The Children of the Night" and "The Black Stone", published in Weird Tales in 1931.
[5] Since the German adjective may not only translate to "unspeakable, unutterable, ineffable", but also to "unpronounceable, tongue-twisting",[6] the title might serve as a description of the names invented by Lovecraft.
Part of Price's objection to the title, besides the grammatical issue, was this alternative meaning which he believed did not convey the required feeling of dread.
Besides von Junzt, the death warrant is also signed, amongst others, by Abdul Alhazred,[5] the fictional author of the Necronomicon and a pseudonym of Lovecraft he used as a five-year-old.
The English edition was issued by Bridewall in London in 1845, but (being meant to sell purely based on shock-value) contained numerous misprints and was badly translated.
A lavishly illustrated but heavily expurgated (a full quarter of the original material) edition was later issued in New York by Golden Goblin Press in 1909, but sold few copies as its high production costs made it prohibitively expensive.
Few copies of the earliest edition still exist because most were burnt by their owners when word of von Junzt's gruesome demise became common knowledge.
The principal obscurity of the book is von Junzt's use of the word keys—"a phrase used many times by him, in various relations"—in connection with certain items and locations, such as the Black Stone and the Temple of the Toad (possibly associated with Tsathoggua) in Honduras.
In F. Paul Wilson's 1981 novel The Keep, Captain Klaus Woermann reads an excerpt from the Unaussprechlichen Kulten and finds it a disturbing experience.
The 2009 novel Triumff by Dan Abnett features a page of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, shown to the titular hero as a test to see if he has ever studied Goetia.