{"id":33485,"date":"2010-02-24T06:23:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T06:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jordanhthonextract2.wordpress.com\/2010\/02\/24\/the-old-paperbacks-pt-ii-complete-blish-covers"},"modified":"2011-09-23T04:00:02","modified_gmt":"2011-09-23T04:00:02","slug":"the-old-paperbacks-pt-ii-complete-blish-covers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/the-old-paperbacks-pt-ii-complete-blish-covers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Old Paperbacks! Pt. II: Complete Blish Covers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"\/ns\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-import\/2010\/02\/star_trek_blish_covers_1.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/ns\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-import\/2010\/02\/star_trek_blish_covers_1-w=300.jpg\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><br \/><a href=\"\/ns\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-import\/2010\/02\/star_trek_blish_covers_2.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/ns\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-import\/2010\/02\/star_trek_blish_covers_2-w=300.jpg\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><br \/><a href=\"\/ns\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-import\/2010\/02\/star_trek_blish_covers_3.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/ns\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-import\/2010\/02\/star_trek_blish_covers_3-w=300.jpg\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><br \/>About a week ago I <a href=\"http:\/\/horrorthon.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/old-paperbacks.html\">posted photographs<\/a> of the contents of a box of old paperbacks I&#8217;d retrieved from my parents&#8217; house. Of course you all immediately noticed the glaring omission in that post: I display the ostensibly-complete sequence of James Blish books (called <i>Star Trek 1<\/i> through <i>Star Trek 12<\/i>) with <i>two volumes missing.<\/i> That&#8217;s right, <i>Star Trek 10<\/i> and <i>Star Trek 11<\/i> were not in the box. (Also, the quality of the &#8220;<i>Star Trek<\/i> paperbacks&#8221; picture I posted last week was really bad.)<\/p>\n<p>Of course I knew I had those other two books&#8230;I just had misplaced them, that&#8217;s all. I specifically remember triumphantly completing the set some time in ninth grade, way too old for it but not being able to resist the final volume off a sidewalk blanket. Anyway I had to go back there tonight (my mother&#8217;s computer&#8230;don&#8217;t ask) and I did some fishing around and located the two missing books. So, above, please observe brand new scans of the 12 covers of these pre-home-video, completely superfluous volumes into which weird British hack James Blish has transcribed the scripts of all 79 episodes of <i>Star Trek<\/i>, while making arbitrary changes and added his own strange details whenever he felt like it. Terrible stuff&#8230;and Blish didn&#8217;t even survive the process; as you can see, the final book was finished by somebody else (somebody even <i>more<\/i> of a hack than James Blish).<\/p>\n<p>But, <i>look at those covers!<\/i> They&#8217;re incredible. The first book is obviously a conventional 1960s Hollywood illustration based (pretty clearly) on publicity stills from the episode <i>Where No Man Has Gone Before<\/i> (the second pilot). The second and third are just boring (except for those fantastic numerals)&#8230;but then the paintings start, and all nine of them are exceptional. Remember that this was the &#8216;seventies and the only images we&#8217;d ever seen of the Enterprise in flight were the awful effects shots from the original show. I fondly remember staring at the covers of these books (while eating cereal after school or whatever) and grooving on the incredible images and the way they made the <i>Trek<\/i> universe so much fun to picture. Great stuff.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img width='1' height='1' src='https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/17244873-341260756287118177?l=horrorthon.blogspot.com' alt='' \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About a week ago I posted photographs of the contents of a box of old paperbacks I&#8217;d retrieved from my parents&#8217; house. Of course you all immediately noticed the glaring omission in that post: I display the ostensibly-complete sequence of James Blish books (called Star Trek 1 through Star Trek 12) with two volumes missing. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horrorthon_posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33485"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41223,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33485\/revisions\/41223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}