By David Tilotta and Curt McAloney

Titan Books, out now

The Original Series – as you’ve never seen it before.

October 11, 2010: As editor of Titan’s Star Trek Magazine, I get a lot of pitches for ideas for the magazine but this email looks intriguing. It’s from Dave Tilotta, offering previously unseen images from the original series, sourced from the cells that Lincoln Enterprises sent out to fans. He’s suggested it a few months earlier, but we were unsure then whether the official mag can get involved (particularly with everything to do with the new movie). Now some of them have been used in the licensed Star Trek 365 book, and the co-author of that book, Paula M. Block, has suggested the mag might be the right home. I enthusiastically agree, and for the rest of my tenure (the next year or so) we run selections (often trying to tie them to the issue’s theme), with text by resident Trek expert Larry Nemecek.

October 11, 2018: Eight years later, to the day, a copy of Lost Scenes – a coffee-table sized book – arrives. The small feature in STM has become a gloriously rendered, beautifully laid out celebration of The Original Series, with a foreword by Doug Drexler, and text that provides context historically, and within the series. Where deleted scenes are included, we get the dialogue that would have been with them; where it’s a blooper, the cause of the merriment is explained. A lot of technical terms are quickly and sensibly explained – Dutch angles, “shot with protest” – and you feel as if you are inside the production.

There are a lot of memoirs that pass on the participants’ recollections of their time on the original series; there’s “B-roll” footage on the DVD and Blu-ray sets. But this is the first time that there’s been a book that pictorially makes you feel you were there.

Verdict: An essential addition to any Star Trek fan’s bookcase – and I wish there were similar for all iterations of the franchise. Highly recommended. 10/10

Paul Simpson

Click here to order from Amazon.co.uk