John Robert Colombo has compiled, translated, and written over eighty books. His volumes of original and found poetry include such innovated collections as The Great Wall of China, Mostly Monsters, Variable Cloudiness, and Off Earth. He co-translated into English five books of Bulgarian literature, not to mention books of verse originally written in Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, etc. In the field of native studies he has compiled Windigo, Poems of the Inuit, Songs of the Indians, and Songs of the Great Land.

Among his large-scale literary anthologies are The Poets of Canada and Colombo's Book of Canada. He edited Other Canadas, the country's first anthology of science fiction and fantasy, and beginning with Mysterious Canada, he has written or compiled six books of paranormal Canadiana. Worlds in Small, in common with Colombo's earlier publications, combines showmanship and scholarship in equal measure.