The book was originally published by Sphinx Verlag and was republished in 1993 by Morpheus International with additional artwork from Giger's Alien designs. A subsequent collection of his images followed as H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon 2, printed in 1985 by Edition C of Switzerland.
Giger's Necronomicon is named for H. P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, a fictional book Lovecraft invented and used as a plot device in his stories. Lovecraft's Necronomicon was a compendium of pre-human lore compiled by the mad poet Abdul Alhazred, circa 700 AD.