The Star Trek Concordance by Bjo Trimble

The Star Trek Concordance
by Bjo Trimble [791.457 StaYt]

For any true die-hard Star Trek fan (i.e. “trekkie” or “trekker”), Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance is an essential part of your fannish library. First published as a fan edition, available only through fannish networks, Trimble was able to find a professional publisher, Ballantine, who put this book out in 1976 as an oversized trade paperback, complete with a unique design element – a spinning disc on the front cover with cut-out windows, which allowed you to spin to an episode title, or a stardate, or a writer or director, and see the corresponding entries within the book. The book itself gave detailed plot descriptions for every “original series” Star Trek episode (as well as the animated Star Trek series), complete with primary credits (writer, director, main guest cast). There were detailed alphabetical indexes to all things Trek — you could look up the entries for Andorians, or Tellarites, or the planets and characters featured in the 79 original episodes, and see how they connected with the rest of the original series canon.

This was all in the pre-internet days, before the existence of such wonderful sites as Memory Alpha, which serves the same purposes now. In 1995, Trimble put out an all-new edition of the book, still focused exclusively on the “original series”, but now updated to include the first 7 Star Trek feature films featuring the original cast, as well as some (but not all) episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space 9 that featured original series characters appearing in “new generation” stories. Both the 1976 and 1995 Concordances include quite a lot of fan art — something you don’t see in many of the other professionally published Trek non-fiction books. Having grown up using these two books as my ultimate resource for Classic Trek questions, I still love sitting down and browsing both volumes — I do use Memory Alpha, so I don’t ignore the online resources available to modern Trek fans, but I still use “do you have a copy of Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance” as my acid test on how devoted a Trek fan truly is!

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try On the Good Ship Enterprise, Bjo Trimble’s personal memoir about her history with Star Trek, including her legendary write-in campaigns that saved the series from cancellation — twice!]

[ History of the Star Trek Concordance at Fanlore.org ] | [ Memory Alpha page for Bjo Trimble (with links to more info) ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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