The Star Trek Compendium

The Star Trek Compendium is a reference book published by Pocket Books that provides an extensive episode guide to the original Star Trek series, beefed out with production background information, researched and compiled by its author.
==Summary==
From the fourth edition book jacket
:"Space… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations – to boldly go where no man has gone before…"''
:On September 8, 1966, those now-familiar words first introduced an entire generation of television viewers to STAR TREK. Over the course of its three-year network run, the show developed a fan following unprecedented in entertainment history – a following that is still growing with the release of each new STAR TREK motion picture.
:Much of the show's appeal came from its blueprint for the future – a future where man had put aside his differences to reach the stars. STAR TREK gave us a Russian and an American working side by side, television's first interracial kiss, the name for America's first Space Shuttle – – and a host of unforgettable characters: the unflappable Captain Kirk, his half-Human science officer Spock, the irascible Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, and ever-resourceful engineer Montgomery Scott, to name but a few.
:THE STAR TREK COMPENDIUM is the official guidebook to the STAR TREK universe. Relive the voyages of the with a complete show-by-show guide to the series (as well as the Emmy Award-winning animated shows and the STAR TREK movies), including plot summaries, fascinating behind-the-scenes production information and credits for each. Follow the creation of Gene Roddenberry's series step-by-step – and STAR TREKs road to the big screen. Illustrated with over 125 specially selected photographs – including at least one from each episode – and fully indexed, this is the indispensable reference work to one of the most memorable shows of all time – STAR TREK.
::This text was on the back of all four editions; later editions included a line mentioning the inclusion of material from the latest movie.
==Background information==
* Written by Allan Asherman, the book was first published in and gave summaries and production information on all three seasons of and . It was not the first of its kind, as Star Trek fan Bjo Trimble had previously released a similar work, the Star Trek Concordance. Unlike some of the later editions, it also gave the actual production schedule for each of the episodes (script dates, when it was filmed, etc.) The edition also included episode summaries and production information for both seasons of and the next two . A UK edition, released between the first two US editions, incorporated excerpted material from , reprinted from the author's own The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The third edition was issued after the release of the following two films, and the fourth edition to cover the sixth, and were updated to summarize the given films. 
* The original English edition was never updated to cover , as that film was covered in the . However, the German edition did have a small section dedicated to that film.
* The book's format inspired that of the later The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager companions. No companion book has been issued for .
* The book contains a large amount of TOS background information and trivia, presented for the first time in one book. However, as it came out long before the release of Inside Star Trek: The Real Story and other similar works, it still did contain some trivia long adhered to in "Trek lore", but which eventually turned out to be only myths.
* Similarly, as the internet was non-existent and only a handful of official publications about Star Trek were available at the time, the book contains some factual errors. For example, the Mugato is spelled as "Mugatu", "Court Martial" is mentioned as taking place at Starbase 6 instead of Starbase 11, and the McKinley Rocket Base is misidentified as Cape Kennedy.
* Translated international editions are known to exist, among others in German (as Star Trek, Raumschiff Enterprise, das offizielle Logbuch, translated by Martin Noeken for Heel Verlag) and Italian (as Guida ufficiale a Star Trek serie classica by Fanucci Editore). Aside from these, a Japanese-language 4th edition is known to have been released as Volume 2 in the Japanese so-called "Star Trek Academic Research" ("Sutā torekku daikenkyū II") series from publisher Japan Mix, Inc., and was translated into that language by Sumitomo Susumu. The deviant page count of that edition is due to the smaller manga-sized format the book was released in.
===Cover gallery===
File:The Star Trek Compendium, 1st edition reprint.jpg|1st edition reprint cover
File:The Star Trek Compendium, 2nd edition (US).jpg|2nd edition cover
File:The Star Trek Compendium, 2nd edition.jpg|2nd edition cover (UK)
File:The Star Trek Compendium, 3rd edition.jpg|3rd edition cover
The Star Trek Compendium, 3rd edition (Italian).jpg|3rd edition cover (Italian)
File:The Star Trek Compendium, 4th edition.jpg|4th edition cover
File:The Star Trek Compendium, 4th edition (UK).jpg|4th edition cover (UK)
File:The Star Trek Compendium, 4th edition (Japan).jpg|4th edition cover (Japan)
File:The Star Trek Compendium, 4th edition (German).jpg|4th edition cover (German)
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