Largest-Ever Auction of Star Trek Memorabilia Starts Wednesday

Beginning Wednesday and running through Friday, the biggest cache of Star Trek memorabilia ever to go on auction will open for bidding.

“It’s the largest offering of ‘Star Trek’ original series items ever compiled," said auctioneer Brian Chanes with Profiles in History, the Calabasas, Calif.-based auctioneer of Hollywood memorabilia.

In the trove are scripts from the original series, which ran 1966 to 1969, including an art director’s script with doodles of the original look of the Enterprise. The auction will also include costumes and a weapon from an iconic fight between Kirk and Spock that took place on the planet Vulcan.

Also for sale is something that isn’t a prop, exactly, but a backstage gag. During shooting of Star Trek Nemesis, the bridge chair Patrick Stewart sat on in the film was stolen from the set. Scott Bakula, then on the show Star Trek Enterprise, needled his fellow franchise actor by having the wood shop make a replacement child’s chair, with the word “KaPtAiN” scrawled on it and a note that read, “Hey captain, I understand you’re having a hard time locating your chair…Enjoy!”

Star Trek, which marks its 50th anniversary this year, has a longevity and iconic status few shows can match. Perhaps, as Manu Saadia observed in Money, it endures because of its essentially optimistic vision of the future. "In Star Trek’s hypothetical society—the Federation—poverty, greed and want no longer exist," wrote Saadia, author of Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek. "To a 21st century audience, beset by growing inequality and a sense of dread in the face of coming automation, such a world seems entirely out of reach."

But for a few days this week, you can get your hands on a piece of it.