Starfleet Library update

Well, that was overdue. Anyway, a number of items have been added or updated, and the schedule page has also been updated.

Some of the new items for 2011:

• The Star Trek Top Ten Book
• Star Trek: Politics: The Political Culture Of A Sci-Fi-Series
• The Other in Star Trek: A Comparison of The Original Series and The Next Generation
• Prime Directive
• Star Wars vs Star Trek: Could the Empire Kick the Federation's Ass? And Other Galaxy-Shaking Enigmas
• 9/11 in Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: Enterprise: How 9/11 Influenced These Sci-Fi Shows

The other stuff you probably know about already. (But who would have imagined, a year or two ago, a schedule almost completely devoid of IDW comic collections?)

If I hadn't already more or less given up on being a completist kind of collector, some of this year's unauthorized books might have been the tipping point. We have two books about politics and Trek written by someone whose knowledge of English isn't very good (and whose knowledge of politics I'm not convinced about, either). We have a collection of 285 David Letterman-style top ten lists related to Star Trek, none of the examples of which I've seen have actually been funny. And a thesis published by a company known for charging too much and claiming the authors' IP rights, which is available online in its original form for free.

I may just go for Prime Directive, though -- it's not expensive and it has a very positive quote from Joe Haldeman on the cover. Still, book-length poems about Star Trek as a lens for reviewing one's relationship with one's father aren't my usual reading material. Never hurts to broaden one's horizons, though.

New Star Trek auction catalogue -- free!

Propworx has an online auction of Star Trek uniforms, props, etc, today. For their first big auction they produced a very nice hardcover auction catalogue and gave a way a pdf version. This time they're doing the pdf version only. It's not quite as nice as the first, but it's probably still worth getting if you're interested in this kind of thing.

As far as I know, from a book collecting perspective, the first Propworx catalogue and the two-volume Christie's catalogue are the only Star Trek auction catalogues in print. They may not be easy to find, but anyone interested in behind the scenes stuff, props, costumes, and all that sort of thing really should have them.

A couple of sample images, a matte painting I wish I could afford and a model detail: