Continued from last month's discussion of the fonts of the tv shows...What launched this whole series was actually me thinking about
Star Trek books. In the old days,
Star Trek books weren't quite so branded. The original
Star Trek book, James Blish's 1967 book originally known as just
Star Trek (later printings would dub it
Star Trek 1), used a font reminiscent of the tv one, but not the actual one. (Based on messing around with font identifier sites, I think this is something called "BF Anorak Condensed Bold Italic," except that Anorak is a 1999 creation, so I am assuming it's a knock-off of a vintage font I can't identify.)
The first
Star Trek novel,
Mission to Horatius (1968),
did use the proper logo...
...but it was an outlier. When
Spock Must Die! (1970) launched Bantam's line of original
Star Trek fiction it used no logo at all, just the text "A STAR TREK NOVEL" at the top of the cover. So this isn't
Star Trek: Spock Must Die!, but
Spock Must Die!, a novel that happens to be based on
Star Trek.
This was pretty typical of the Bantam Star Trek books, as well as the early Pocket releases, which all took this approach. They would have to wait for re-releases to get proper logos, which seemed to mostly happen around the mid-1980s. Maybe with the adventure of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was that Star Trek was becoming more of what we now call a "franchise"?
Here's how Spock Must Die! looked for its 1984 reprinting, for example, which doesn't have much of a logo, but there's sort of a distinctive font, and the "an original ... adventure" part is so small you don't see it from a distance. The horizontal line coming off "STAR TREK" feels reminiscent of horizontal line in the Star Trek: The Motion Picture logo-- a film Bantam didn't have the rights to, so maybe they were dancing around it all! In the US, Bantam's Star Trek novels didn't get a proper logo on the covers until they were reprinted in the late 1990s!
One of the earliest, if not the earliest, unique-to-the-books logos was from Corgi, a publisher which reprinted Star Trek books in the UK in the 1970s. This is the earliest use of it I can find, from a 1972 reprinting of James Blish's Star Trek 2. Corgi would use this for all its reprints in the 1970s and 1980s. I can't decide what I think of this one.
The 1970s also saw a weird, unique logo used on a range of
Star Trek publications, mostly from Ballantine, including
Star Trek Blueprints (1974), the
Star Fleet Technical Manual (1975), the 1975 reprintings of
The Making of Star Trek and
The World of Star Trek, and the children's picture book
The Prisoner of Vega (1977). I like this one; it has a sort of delicious curvy 1970sishness to it that
Star Trek by and large has not gone for.
The font is called "Wexford"; that link gives you a nice range of images of it in use, almost all on groovy 1970s science fiction book covers! Wexford was never officially digitized, but someone made their own interpretation of it called "Wexley" which you can get. (Another guy-- who specialized in making knockoffs of sci-fi fonts-- made his own version called, appropriately, "Majel.")
Alan Dean Foster adapted the episodes of the 1970s
Star Trek cartoon under the banner title
Star Trek Logs (1974-78). Their early printings used a sort of non-logo logo, with just the word "STAR TREK" written in what I am pretty sure is "
Futura Pro Bold Condensed Oblique." Futura is a classic of science fiction fonts; the base font was originally designed in 1927, and it still has a futuristic look
you will recognize from movies, perhaps most notably 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Reprintings from 1977 onward (as well as the two that were first published 1977-78), though, replaced that with this unique chiseled-steel logo, which I think is pretty cool. Again, it's a unique logo as far as I know.
The history of the logo on early Pocket Books covers is less interesting. Early Pocket novels, as I said, were much like the Bantam ones in not using a logo. See, for example, the cover of the first original novel from Pocket, The Entropy Effect (1981). Later Pocket novels would drop the "TIMESCAPE" logo (Timescape was an sf imprint from Pocket, trading on the fame of Gregory Benford's Nebula-, BSFA-, and Campbell Memorial-winning 1980s novel Timescape), but would otherwise keep to a design much like this for the first half-decade.
The font used for the words on the cover of
The Entropy Effect is also from the Futura family; specifically it's "
Futura Display." That's how you know it's the future, I guess! Amazingly, despite many tweaks to the cover template, Futura Display lasted all the way up to the 97th and last numbered original series novel,
In the Name of Honor (2002). That's a twenty-one-year run, which seem pretty incredible for design consistency. (I should note that not every one of the 97 novels used it, as some books adopted special cover designs for whatever reasons.)
The first mass-market paperback
Star Trek book from Pocket to use the logo on the cover was
Chain of Attack (1987). (Some of Pocket's "giant novels" and hardcovers did use logos.) This seems to have been an attempt to clean up the branding with the imminent arrival of
Star Trek: The Next Generation. I suppose that at that point, you wanted to clearly know what
kind of
Star Trek novel you were dealing with-- and also putting "A STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION NOVEL" on the cover would be a bit much!
The only other interesting novel logo of the pre-2000 novels is from a re-release of James Blish's adaptations. The original ones had been released in a pretty arbitrary order across thirteen volumes; for the 25th anniversary, Bantam republished them in three chunky volumes, organized by season. See, for example, the cover here of
Star Trek: The Classic Episodes 1 (1991). This one I find interesting because it's kind of an adaptation of the logo used for the original series movies, but thicker and italicized.
It wasn't actually unique to the novels, but used on a range of 25th-anniversary merchandise, including the computer game and some trading cards:
I had thought I could get by just doing one post on the books, but that's clearly not the case, so I'll end it here.
Next time I'll cover the logos used by Pocket/Simon & Schuster for their fiction not based on any one television series...
Most cover art supplied by ISFDB. Thanks to Ian "Therin of
Andor" McLean for his picture of the 25th-anniversary trading cards, and
to the TrekBBS poster Avro Arrow for pointing me toward a couple of
these I hadn't noticed myself.
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