Over the years I've read several of these "Best of Trek" collections by Irwin and Love, but I've never actually seen the magazine that they are supposedly culled from. I'm assuming it no longer exists. Does anybody know anything about it? When I google, all I find are the books. Was it an actual magazine?
Yes, I have a few copies of it in magazine form. It was very similar to James Van Hise's "Enterprise Incidents"; a "pro zine" of the day with fairly good presentation via off-set printing when many other zines were still using Roneo and Gestetner stencils. I believe "Trek" actually ceased circulation several years before the "Best of Trek" compilations did, but articles still flooded in to the editors due to the address in the paperbacks. Ooooh, lookie! It's the Fall 1981 issue, #19. http://www.amazon.com/Trek-Magazine-Star-Fans-Fanzine/dp/B002ERETYA
As a fan in England we didn't get many fanzines (I guess they were pretty much before my time anyway). Since these things would never be allowed nowadays (and have pretty much been replaced with fan websites), what I would love would be some website with scanned-in PDF's of as many old fanzines as possible for everyone (i.e. me) to enjoy today. I'm not talking about any dodgy file-sharing, just old fan mags from the 70's and early 80's that would never be allowed reprint.
I've picked up half a dozen issues of Trek over the years, looking for Star Trek comics info. An interesting magazine, although I've never had the urge to read the paperback collections. You can buy copies of some issues of Trek at StarTrekGoodies.com, a mail-order vendor of Star Trek memorabilia. StarTrekGoodies has cover thumbnails. I don't know of any sites offering full scans of the magazine. Frederick, the fellow behind My Star Trek Scrapbook, occasionally posts scans of covers. He might post scans of articles from Trek sooner or later. Issues #5, 6 and 7 have b&w reprints of British Star Trek comics.
At some point in the '80s, having read several Best of Trek collections, I sent my money off for the subscription they advertised in the books. Got a letter saying they didn't publish the magazine any more, so here were four issues from recent years. Most of the contents had appeared in past books. I wasn't thrilled. They kept talking about Trek as an ongoing magazine in the books for many years after the magazine stopped publishing, but then they seemed to have a ridiculously long lead time.
Actually, the UK had a very active fanzine community in the 70s and 80s, mainly fiction, though, not articles like "Trek" and "Enterprise Incidents", but there were definitely UK "newszines" and "letterzines", too. Why many of them seem so rare now is because they were rare even then. Even very notorious zines were often only of an initial circulation of 100 or so. Illegal photocopies often spread the controversial stuff beyond the editors' knowledge. Why not? So long as amateur "Star Trek" fanzines don't attempt to make a profit - and don't attempt to resemble the rival licensed ST magazines, comics or novels - they are tolerated by Paramount/CBS, and always have been. Internet versions of fanzines mean that fans no longer have to order by mail and pay postage, and fanzine publishers aren't up for any printing costs or storage problems. Hard to compete, so hardcopy zines have faded away. I'd happily scan my own published zines. But: the tricky bit is finding all the contributors. (I've tried.) They did not write and draw for zines in the knowledge that technology could allow their work to be shared in this way, and several of my contributors went on to become published pro authors and illustrators - and don't necessarily want their early work online and fully searchable. (I've asked.) Typically, copyright stayed with the contributors, not the editor. ("Trek" magazine was a bit different in that the contributors signed a contract, permitting copyright to transfer to Irwin & Love. Payment only happened if selected for a "Best of Trek" volume. My friend, Valerie Parv, now an extremely successful pro writer, contributed "Star Trek Jokes" to a "Best of Trek" as her first official writing sale, but elected to cross out the clause about infinite reprint rights, thus she knew her article would never reappear in "The Best of the Best of Trek".) But they would be allowed as hardcopy reprints. Unless they were full-on novels, comics or attempts to replicate Titan's official magazine. There's just no longer a viable market for hardcopy fan-created material. Hence the resurgence in fanfilms! No doubt a pretense to continue the "Best of..." books, which did seem to have good print runs - and Signet did all the distribution, of course. I'm betting Signet's lawyers had negotiated a contract that ensured Paramount would permit the books' existence, and that contracts specified it was reprint material of an ongoing fanzine.
Same here, except I didn't send the money, but wrote first. But with each subsequent book, they kept advertising it. I could never figure out what was going on. I have the run except for the first issue.
Until recently, I owned five issues of the Trek fanzine. With so much Star Trek memorabilia sitting unappreciated in boxes, though, I finally decided to sell off my collection, which I'v been doing on eBay. I shipped off those issues of Trek just last month.
It's a shame the "before they were famous" authors don't want their early stuff resurrected. I can understand why, but the fact they don't want people reading their early (even if it is rubbish) stuff makes me want to read it all the more! Sadly it can't even be reproduced online without author info, since the internet would probably allow anyone interested to find out who wrote what in about 20 seconds. Unless some sort of campaign of misinformation were launched at the same time. Probably going a bit far. Hmph. The closest thing to a fanzine I ever saw was a collection of badly photocopied FASA stuff about Klingons at a boot sale once.
It's not a case of "not wanting" people to see it. People move on from their early work for all kinds of reasons. Well, it could be, but it's not very ethical. Actually, I discovered one day that several stories from a fanzine I edited have been transcribed to the web without the authors' (or my) permission. I've seen copies of my zines go in auctions for $75 - and yet I still have copies here I used to sell for $5 each. One can only shrug. You're not trying hard enough.
Oddly, we have a feature on the history of fanzines in the next issue of the mag, including a section on Trek. It's one of those magazines that I remember fondly, and the high quality of many of the features in it is what we're aiming for with the mag nowadays.
Getting news of any kind - fact, rumor or gossip - about Trek or other TV and movie projects in the 70s and 80s was a far cry from the near-instant, full-color world of teh Intarwebs. I remember in 1978 when I first worked out the editorial lead-time on Starlog for myself - anything in it was just about six weeks old the day it hit the newstand. In 1981 I discovered Weekly Variety at a local university library, cutting the age of hard news down to only...well, a week, obviously. Unlike the fan press, of course, the trade press didn't treat Trek as any kind of big news in those days so one had to pore over the column filler paragraphs for tidbits without context - Montalban was obvious and told us a lot about what the movie would be about, but who the hell were Kirstie Alley and Merritt Buttrick and what were they going to do in a Star Trek movie?
I remember subscribing to these after running across "The Best of Trek" at the newsstand. It was always fun to find one of their magazines waiting for me at the end of school. They always mailed them in a manilla envelope so that the so-called "Post Awful" wouldn't put the mailing labels on their covers. The first magazine I got was Trek#10 "The Special Kirk Issue" and I immediately got a paper cut from opening the cover to start reading!!
I got into the letterzine Interstat, run by Teri Meyer, around the time TNG started, which wasn't long before Interstat came to an end. It was a lot of fun, but once people started going online in large quantities, letterzines were passe -- you didn't have to wait a few weeks to read whether anyone had a response to what you had to say, or to respond to someone else's comments.