1988: TITAN BOOKS ADVERT FOR STAR TREK AND BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

From September 1988: Titan Books promote their growing STAR TREK line of paperbacks and large format titles (published under license from Pocket Books here in the UK) and their brief daliance with BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

The latter was timed to make the most of the BBC TWO repeat run, the first time that the show had been networked (after ITV scheduled it on a station-by-station basis) in the UK.  The BBC skipped, the rights reasons, the three-hour opener and the two-part The Living Legend.  The following episode, Fire In Space (which also formed the second theatrical movie MISSION GALACTICA: THE CYLON ATTACK) was scheduled but had to be pulled at the last minute because it coincided with the aftermath of the King's Cross fire disaster.

Titan's publishing schedule consisted of new editions of the first three paperbacks originally published in the late Seventies (adapting Saga of a Star World, The Gun On Ice Planet Zero and Lost Planet of the Gods).  All of which were frequent secondhand bookshop fodder at the time and quite easy to track down, albeit sometimes in a well read condition.  Sales obviously weren't great because Titan didn't crack on with new editions of the rest of the US titles, which was a shame as the rest of the run were a darn sight harder to find on this side of the Atlantic.

1991: JUDGE DREDD 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (TITAN BOOKS)

From 1991: Titan Books celebrated a decade of publishing JUDGE DREDD and 2000AD reprint albums with this special anniversary edition of the first JD book.

The Titan albums were regularly advertised in the pages of 2000AD but, unless you happened to live near Forbidden Planet or another comic book stockest, hard to find in the real world. That gave them something of a holy grail quality... a perception enhanced by their substantial cover price (for kids) for soft cover black & white reprints (with no royalties paid to the creative teams... although they were commissioning new cover art).

It took a few more years for IPC themselves to realise that their inventory could have value in the UK. In the mid-Eighties they launched a range of BEST OF monthlies built around the back catalogue (traditionally used to take the pressure off origination budgets in the weeklies and to pad out the specials and annuals) with varying degrees of success. The 2000AD edition, later joined by a separate Dredd spin-off, ran for a decade (and a bit longer if you count the post-movie relaunches).

Titan milked the Tharg franchise as long as possible and used it as the launch pad to expand further into book publishing (including UK editions of some DC trade paperbacks as well as the original STAR TREK novels) followed by magazines, UK comics and - now - the extensive range of US format comic books.

1990: STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION NOVELIZATION PHOTO-COVER EDITION (Titan Books)

From 1990: The Titan Books reissue of the STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION: ENCOUNTER AT FARPOINT novelization, now adorned with a cast photo cover, and released to coincide with the BBC's belated acquisition of the show for BBC TWO's early evening schedules.

That was a controversy-baiting bit of scheduling because fans, after having been made to wait three years for the British telly premiere, had expected a more respectful peak time slot... ideally on the main channel.  They took the sleight as further evidence that the Corporation mandarins were anti all things SF but conveniently overlooked that the early episodes weren't always much cop.

The first editions of the book had appeared in 1987 to coincide with the show's US syndicated premiere but such was the haste to hit the release date, the image-free cover looked more like a crude mock-up for publicity and solicitation purposes.

I've not read this since that first 1987 edition (now unfortunately long-since lost) but I do remember that, to hit that on-sale date, it was based rather obviously on the shooting script and series bible and (like the early DC Comics tie-ins) wasn't entirely faithful to either the show as aired on its principal characters.