Star Trek: Ships of the Line


 * You may be looking for the books Ship of the Line or Ships of the Line.

Star Trek: Ships of the Line is a series of Star Trek calendars that began production in for the year. They feature starships from all eras, as well as ships created 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 and Andrews McMeel Publishing, 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 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."(}, 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 life-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 a book thus conceived, hard on the heels of the dismal performance of the like-wise conceived books Star Trek: Action! (a project of Clark herself) and New Worlds, New Civilizations, proposed a calendar format instead, as a testbed for the potentially later to be produced book. 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 for Star Trek's  anniversary, where (cropped) images from all the calendars were collected, with a brief description of each by Mike Okuda.

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, 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 Facebook page, thereby suggesting it was to be the final one. Nevertheless a 2014 edition has already been announced, as Universe Publishing has taken over the co-publishing rights from Pocket Books in 2012.

Calendars produced

 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2001)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2002)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2003)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2004)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2005)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2006)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2007)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2008)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2009)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2010)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2011)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2012)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2013)
 * Star Trek: Ships of the Line (2014)