Mark Campbell casts his eye over a once hugely popular format that made films and television series available to the massesthe Fotonovel!

Don’t you just hate articles that begin “before Blu-rays, before DVDs, before videos, there was blah blah blah…”? Well, before Blu-rays, before DVDs, before videos, there was…the Fotonovel. Or Photonovel. Or Photo Story. Or even Movie Novel (not to be confused with a novelization). Call it what you will, it was a paperback book - mostly novel-sized, but sometimes a large format affair - filled with stills from a particular film or television series.

My introduction to the Fotonovel began with those beautifully produced adaptations of Star Trek episodes from Bantam Books. Published between 1977 and 1978, twelve stories were turned into Fotonovels, each one boasting “300 full color action scenes.”

The twelve uniformly designed titles, starting with the Hugo Award-winning City on the Edge of Forever (1967), provided 150 pages of densely illustrated glossy pages that included every scene, and pretty much every line of dialogue, from the story in question. They were immersive, before ‘immersive’ became a buzz-word. The only problem was that because the stills were printed right up to the page edges, you had to pull open the book so wide to see them properly that you were in danger of breaking the spine.

Back when I was growing up in Swanage in the late 70s, they were a feature of our local bookshop, and I think we also had them in our local library too (as featured in the South Africa episode of The Goodies, but that’s another story).

Following on from City, Bantam released Where No Man Has Gone Before (1966), The Trouble with Tribbles (1967), A Taste of Armageddon (1967), Metamorphosis (1967), All Our Yesterdays (1969), A Piece of the Action (1968), The Galileo 7 (sic, 1967), The Devil in the Dark (1967), Day of the Dove (1968), The Deadly Years (1967) and Amok Time (1967).