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Ships of the Line 2001

First Star Trek: Ships of the Line calendar, 2001

Star Trek: Ships of the Line is a series of Star Trek calendars that began production in 2000 for the year 2001. They feature starships from all eras, as well as ships created specifically for the calendars. The format is in a uncommon horizontal alignment, with a two-page spread of the picture and has been used for all editions, with the exception of the 2002 calendar. The calendars were co-publications of Pocket Books (production) and Andrews McMeel Publishing (distribution) until 2012, when their calendar publications were taken over by Italian publishing house Rizzoli International Publications who continued their publications under the imprint Universe Publishing.

The calendar series originated as the brainchild of Adam Lebowitz at the time he and his team were working on the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards sequence for VOY: "Relativity" at Foundation Imaging. As he put it, "In fact, the whole time we were working on the episode, we thought it was a shame that the people at home would only see this stuff on blurry TV screens, and not in the high-resolution glory we had created them in." (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 2, Issue 9, p. 102) What Lebowitz had in mind was to produce a coffee table book filled with high resolution, high gloss CGI images, based on the existing live-action production CGI models actually used for the Star Trek productions. With the assistance of Robert Bonchune, he produced a portfolio of images, he envisioned, to clarify his intent to then-chief editor of Pocket Books, Margaret Clark. Clark, not convinced of the viability of such a book, hard on the heels of the dismal performance of the likewise conceived books Star Trek: Action! (a project of Clark herself) and New Worlds, New Civilizations, proposed a calendar format instead as a testbed for a book to potentially be produced later. Unfortunately, the book, which was to be called "Star Trek: The Unseen Frontier Declassified Images from the History of the Federation", never came to fruition due to the failure of the second edition in the series, despite the overwhelming success of the first one. A far less ambitious book entitled Ships of the Line was published in 2006 for Star Trek's 40th anniversary, in which (cropped) images from all the calendars were collected, excepting the 2002 edition, with a brief in-universe description for each by Mike Okuda. An expanded second edition, following the same format as set for the first edition, has followed suit in 2014. In 2015, a poster book, Star Trek: Ships of the Line Posters, was published containing more images from the calendars.

The first calendar was, as intended, filled with images using the actual CGI models used for the productions, as were the later editions, though starting with the second calendar, original artwork (augmented with non-canon ships in later editions), CGI and otherwise, was also inserted. The 2013 edition was the last edition to be printed under the Pocket Books umbrella, as per Doug Drexler's Facebook page, thereby suggesting it was to be the final one. Nevertheless a 2014 edition was eventually released by Universe Publishing, as that company took over the calendar (co-)publishing rights from Pocket Books in 2012.

Calendars produced[]

Note: If a particular image can be related to an event depicted in any of the aired or printed Star Trek productions, it is thus noted in parentheses; otherwise they are originally conceived non-related imagery. However, none of the imagery featured within the calendars, or in their book derivatives, is considered "canon".
2000s
2010s
2020s
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