Boldly Going, Going: With 'Star Trek' sale, auctions enter new frontier

This fall, more than a thousand people are expected to attend a Christie's auction in New York for a chance to bid on metal serving trays, plastic drinking glasses and decorative lighting fixtures. The pieces have an unusual provenance: They were all background props on the TV series "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine."

With an auction of 1,000 items of "Star Trek" memorabilia -- about three times the volume of one of its typical sales -- Christie's is generating tremendous publicity for the auction house and for the "Star Trek" franchise of CBS Paramount Television. Fans are salivating over key "Star Trek" icons, like a model of the starship Enterprise (estimate: $15,000 to $25,000). But what's unusual about the sale is the amount of detritus being sold off -- much of which had only a few seconds of screen time in a "Star Trek" TV episode or movie.

There are pieces that even dedicated "Star Trek" viewers would have been hard-pressed to notice on screen, like a set of four imitation-leather-covered office chairs sometimes used as set dressing in the engine room of the Enterprise-E in "Star Trek: First Contact," estimated at $400 to $600. There's an aluminum tool case that Capt. Jean-Luc Picard once used in a scene where he worked on the Borg circuit module in the observation lounge in "Star Trek: Generations" (also $400 to $600). And then there are the Starfleet Command security badges that crewmates flashed in episodes "Demons" and "Terra Prime" of "Star Trek: Enterprise."

But there's a gap between the publicity the auction is generating and the money it's expected to make. The auction's total estimate is $1.2 to $1.8 million -- a small figure for CBS Paramount by Hollywood box-office standards, though a tidy sum for what amounts to a giant garage sale of unused props. Christie's could make less from the "Star Trek" auction than it does from the sale of a single painting at a major contemporary-art sale. Though neither Christie's nor CBS Paramount would discuss details of their agreement, Christie's will receive at least a standard buyer's premium of 20% added to the sale price of most items -- in this case about $360,000 if the sale hits its high estimate. With large crowds and more items for sale than usual, it's also likely to be an unusually complex undertaking.

Christie's has a plan for the sale, however. Of course, it's partly a strategy for generating publicity and attracting a new clientele. But the house is banking on huge sales of its auction catalog -- generating its own collectible from the collectibles sale. And if the sale is successful, it could point the way to auction houses dipping further into the collectibles market dominated by Web sites like eBay, without sacrificing the cachet of a high-end auction.

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