Why does everywhere say that the book is number 42 in the Original Series collection, but my copy says 16 on the side?
Question about TOS's Memory Prime
- Thread starter mattburgess
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Yours is the Titan Books release of Memory Prime - they were reprinting the Pocket releases under their own numbering scheme, as they started in the middle, and filled in as they went along. See http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Titan_Books for more details.
Why did they reprint them? Why didn't Pocket reprint their own stuff?
And why bother changing the numbers?
And why bother changing the numbers?
I don't know for certain, but Simon & Schuster UK had barely gotten off the ground at the time, so it's possible they weren't set up for reprinting their US arm's stuff just yet - either that, or Titan offered more money than it would have cost S&S to do in-house.
As for the numbering, I guess it was easier than explaining where the other 31 books were...
As for the numbering, I guess it was easier than explaining where the other 31 books were...
The US Bantam novels were published by Corgi in the UK. The US Ballantine novelizations of TAS were also published by Corgi in the UK.
When Pocket started its US publishing program, importing of US books into the UK was quite rare. The novelization of TMP was licensed to Futura. Then "The Entropy Effect" went to Orbit. Then there was a lull for a while. ST II went to Futura. Some of the next novelizations went to Granada (ST III) and Grafton (ST IV). And so on.
Finally Titan bought the UK license. They started by reprinting the Corgi/Bantam novels as "Star Trek Adventures", but in a different order.
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Star_Trek_Adventures
After the success of ST IV, there was a huge marketing push, even in the US, with "Chain of Attack" (note Pocket US's sudden prominent use of the TV logo in huge letters, compared to earlier ST novels; possibly inspired by the success of Titan's reprints of the UK Bantams). "Chain of Attack" became Titan's #1. Because Pocket US was doing bimonthly ST releases, but Titan UK wanted monthly releases, Titan started alternating a new, almost-simultaneous release title with an older US title. The UK numbering became totally scrambled. #1, 7 or 17 were novelizations that had previously been published elsewhere locally, so Titan was probably hesitant about starting at that point (although they did end up re-releasing them). In the UK, "Uhura's Song" was a fourth TOS "giant" paperback, to cash in on the great performance of the first three imported US "giant" novels to the UK! That was followed by three more "giants".
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Titan_Books
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I'm amused that five of the first seven Titan Books were actually sequels (or at least followups in some fashion) to previous novels the UK folks hadn't gotten yet. At least they snuck Yesterday's Son in before Time for Yesterday.
Actually, the Adventures line arrived in the mid-90s, about eight years after Titan starting republishing the Pocket releases.
Sorry, I was trying to recall which set of UK reprints started using the words "Star Trek" very large on the covers, and seemingly inspired Pocket to start using the logo on the US novels. It must have been Corgi's last set of 12 Blish adaptations, which had rather beautiful, newly-painted art covers (representing twelve episodes), and were very widely distributed. I was almost tempted to rebuy them just to get the new covers.
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