The transient hot-wire method was used to investigate the thermal conductivity of (+)- and (±)-camphor in the temperature range 40–300 K and for pressures up to 0·5 GPa. Results for the thermal conductivity of crystalline (+)- and (±)-camphor exhibited maximum values at temperatures of 60 and 70 K, respectively, independent of pressure. Above the maxima, the thermal conductivity λ exhibited a less pronounced temperature dependence than the variation λ ∼T-1 which is predicted theoretically for perfect crystals. We showed that the Debye theory can describe the thermal conductivity of molecular crystals like (+)- and (±)-camphor when structural disorder is assumed to provide a significant contribution to the phonon scattering process. We investigated two samples of (±)-camphor of estimated purity 99·3% and 97% and both samples exhibited the same thermal conductivity within experimental inaccuracy.