The Making of Star Trek - out of print?

[Timewalker]

Spock: Messiah is an awesome read, no matter your fan proclivities, because the crew is so out of character!

Hee. I remember exactly where I bought my copy. I was out with my mother on one of our twice-monthly visits, and I was so happy to find another Star Trek book. I grabbed a copy and was fishing out quarters from my purse (babysitting paid a whopping 50 cents/hour back then and the book cost $1.75). My mother was appalled that I would spend that kind of money on a science fiction book (she never did understand SF or why I liked it; she considered it a huge waste of money because nothing about it was "real"). "You don't really want that, do you?"

Well, yeah, Mom. I do. And yeah, I was kinda young (12-13) to read some of the scenes in that novel. But it's no worse than a lot of fanfic, and the novel is still occupying part of my Star Trek bookshelf... 40 years later.

I remember The World of Star Trek as a title, but I'll be darned if I can remember what was in it. Pretty sure I liked it and read it over and over since there wasn't much Trek literature back then, but haven't seen a copy since the 70s.

I also remember Star Trek Lives! from a few years later, roughly the same time as Star Trek: The New Voyages, a collection of early fanfic. A few of the stories were decent but others forgettable and some were just plain bad. Sort of like any given Trek show, I guess.

One of the New Voyages stories, Mind-Sifter, was adapted into a fan film (Phase II/New Voyages).

I blame Star Trek Lives! for the fact that I've got a huge shelf in my apartment that's dedicated to print 'zines - mostly Star Trek from the '60s-'80s, plus some Highlander, Robin of Sherwood, and Doctor Who. There are a couple of infamous ones, namely Spock Enslaved - some sellers on eBay have the price cranked up to $500 USD, although if you shop around you can get it much cheaper. My copy cost less than $25 USD.

 

[Therin of Andor]

A couple of other more-or-less contemporaneous books that may be of interest: The World of Star Trek, and The Trouble with Tribbles, both by David Gerrold.

For a time, DG offered free downloads of the eBook versions of these two titles. They are still available, via his site, as eBooks, but not free.
http://www.gerrold.com/books/

 

[Harvey]

An annotated version of this book for its fiftieth anniversary would be great. There's a lot of valuable information in it, but there's also a lot of claims in the book that are false or have been contested by other sources.

 

[Daddy Todd]

Not just out of print, but LONG out of print.

According to ISFDB, it's been out of print for 25 years -- the last listed printing was the 27th, in September, 1991.