| Cover to the first edition in pristine condition |
| My Concordance, after hours and hours of consultation |
Karen: This particular buried treasure is falling apart at the seams. I was afraid to handle it too much, as it's already in such bad shape. But that just shows you how much I truly treasured it. The Star Trek Concordance was a fantastic reference book when it came out (1976), a one-of-a-kind item that was packed with everything a Trekkie (or Trekker) would want to know about their favorite TV show. It not only has synopses of every single original series episode, it also includes all of the animated episodes too. There is also fan art, which is something I find very heart-warming now, after so much slickly produced material has been available for 30+ years. Trek's enduring nature is due to the determination of the fans, and it's good to be reminded of that.
| Front and back covers |
Following the episode guides is the amazing Lexicon, which catalogs every planet, person, device, ship -anything you can think of that appeared in a Trek episode prior to 1976, you will find it here. What an incredible effort went into this. It is still a thrill to thumb through it (carefully, of course!) and come across things like General Order 24 or Commander Loskene and have old memories stirred up.
There are no photos in the book, only drawings, but I don't find that detrimental at all. After watching the episodes over and over, my mind can certainly provide all the Star Trek images I need.
Trek super-fan Bjo Trimble assembled this monster -she states in the introduction she had been putting together amateur versions during the show's run and distributing them to fans, so this was a collection of all those efforts. It was certainly much appreciated by me as a young Star Trek fan and I am sure by many thousands of other who had to know all the details about Dr. McCoy's medical instruments, or life on Vulcan.And of course, in the days before the Internet, books like this were all we had!