The Book Nook: Star Wars: The Essential Chronology (2000)

 Hey everyone! Welcome to The Book Nook, the series where I talk about the books that I used to own in my collection. Today I'm going to be talking about Star Wars: The Essential Chronology, a Star Wars reference book that came out in 2000 as part of the first wave of the Essential Guides that Del Rey started publishing in 1995. So let's get into it.

Reference books like The Essential Chronology were part and parcel with franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars when I was a kid in the '90s to mid 2000s. They'd existed in the early days of each franchise in the '60s to '80s, but with the introduction of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the TNG movies, DS9, Voyager, the Star Wars special editions, the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and the Star Wars prequels these reference books became more prevalent in the '90s and early 2000s.

The Essential Chronology is a book that looks at the Star Wars Timeline through novels, comics, the West End Games sourcebooks, the movies, and TV shows/TV movies/TV specials. Because this book came out in April 2000, nothing after Episode I, which came out only 11 months earlier, and the first book in the The New Jedi Order series, Vector Prime, existed yet. Vector Prime isn't included in the book simply because this probably had to be submitted to Del Rey and Lucasfilm before Vector Prime had been released so that information wouldn't've been available to the authors for inclusion. Also anything from the prequel era that was published or released after Episode I also wasn't included either so there's a huge gap between The Phantom Menace and The Han Solo Trilogy since back in 2000 that whole prequel era was untapped for stories, besides the Tales of the Jedi comics from Dark Horse, The Han Solo Adventures by Brian Daley, The Adventures of Lando Calrissian by L. Neil Smith, and The Han Solo Trilogy by A.C. Crispin. 

Having said that though, one thing from The New Jedi Order that was included in the book was a slightly longer version of the galactic map that was created for Vector Prime. Which is cool since there wasn't an official galactic map for the Star Wars Universe at the time being that the comics weren't that detailed, neither were the novels or the movies. I also don't know if the old sourcebooks included maps or not since I've never seen them as I was never interested in Role Playing Games.

I think I got this book for my birthday from a family member in like 2002 or 2003, as it was way after the book had come out but before it's revised edition, Star Wars: The New Essential Chronology, was published in 2005. I remember asking for it because I had seen it in the Jawa Trader section of Star Wars Insider Magazine issue #49, the tribute issue to the 20th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. I won't go into what Jawa Trader is here, but I'll do a post about Star Wars Insider and talk about it then.

That's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back next week with more posts. I've got some ideas floating around in my head. Including my review of Batman Returns (1992). So until then have a wonderful weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.