I can remember with disturbing clarity what the first Doctor Who books I ever bought were. Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen (taste or what?), the two volumes of the Programme Guide and the first Quiz Book. It must, I think, have been January 1982 or thereabouts, because I was a new fan and I was spending my Christmas money in Bookland in Liscard, a village on the edge of Wallasey transformed into a shopping centre by 1960s town planners. I have no idea whether Bookland is still there as my folks stopped shopping there years ago and the last time I went there was in my late teens. I think I must have been vaguely aware that there were such things as Who books, having been a patron of St James’s Library in Birkenhead from a very early age, but as a new fan (as of the Five Faces season) this was absolute gold. It was exactly what I needed to absorb what had happened in the Doctor’s past adventures, and even now the first thing I look for when I start getting into a series is a good episode guide. And so began a buying habit which has continued to the present day, except nowadays I tend to put in shipping orders through Amazon.

The Target novelisations of the time sold for about 85p, which I think would have been about a week’s pocket money for me. In the early eighties my dad still went to watch Liverpool on a Saturday afternoon, so like a child of divorce I went out with him in the morning to spend my pocket money, had lunch at home and then went with my mum and grandma to do the food shopping in the afternoon. So it would usually be Bookland in Liscard or W H Smiths in either Birkenhead or occasionally Liverpool which would benefit from my custom on a Saturday morning, depending on what we had planned. At the time, it was almost completely random as to what would be there when I arrived- the DWM of the day didn’t even carry a regular publishing schedule, so it was a surprise to me to find ‘Logopolis’ on sale in W H Smith in Liverpool, because there hadn’t been any word that it was being adapted at all. Good and bad, old and new, it could be anything. The newer titles were more expensive, of course; I recall being taken aback on holiday at being charged £1.50 for ‘The Daemons’ from a little kiosk in Llandudno, but I absolutely devoured it on the way home.

That brings me to another thing- some twenty years on, I can still tie particular books down to particular places. ‘Day of the Daleks’ was bought at the same place and time as ‘The Daemons’, and ‘The Visitation’ was certainly also in Llandudno, but I’m not sure whether it was the same holiday as we went there most years. ‘Talons’ was definitely Shrewsbury, but I lost it at some point while we were staying there and couldn’t get another copy for years afterwards. ‘The Crusaders’ was, strangely enough, from the corner shop a few hundred yards from my mum and dad’s. I can remember having ‘Pyramids of Mars’ on holiday in 1983 when we went to the Longleat celebration (and actually got in!) but whether I bought it down there or not, I can’t remember. Scared the bejeezus out of me, anyway. As did ‘Terror of the Autons’, so much so that I had to move two black plastic bags full of rubbish out of my bedroom before I could settle down to sleep.

Falling in with a few other fans at secondary school only fuelled things- through one of them I discovered Wilsons bookshop in Liverpool (now absorbed by the adjacent garden/DIY shop) which, in addition to several shelves of Who and displaying W H Allen’s list of forthcoming titles, also sold plastic library-style covers for paperbacks. So not only did it become a regular haunt to pick up the latest releases and fill some of those gaps, I’d also ask for a few 178s (the right size for a Target paperback up to about 1987), or 180s if they were out of stock (as they often were, not having restocked since my last visit). They also had a reasonable stock of hardbacks- the cocaine of fandom at the time, trust me. Most fans, if they had any hardback adaptations, had a couple withdrawn from stock at the local library- always good value at 50p or so, and it saved having to get the less durable paperback. That just wasn’t enough for me. In the mid-eighties, W H Allen would bring the hardback out at about £5.95, rising to £7.95 by the time the range was discontinued, some three months before the paperback. As a DWAS member, I could order the hardback with about a pound off once postage was taken into account, so what with careful use of savings and persuading parents to write a stream of cheques out for me, I soon had a reasonable collection.

It was a shame when the hardbacks were discontinued, however understandable as they were primarily aimed at the library market and few of those could justify £8 a month for a single book. St James’s seemed to indiscriminately divide its Who between the children’s and Young Adult section (the Young Adult section having a highly disturbing caricature of Laurel and Hardy on the wall, presumably to put the youngsters off). Over the years I amassed about sixty or so in varying conditions- shortly after the range was stopped, W H Smith bought up much of the remaining stock and sold them for a pound a go on their bargain shelves. But- and this is important- they sent different titles to different shops, necessitating a couple of interesting days out. ‘The Ark’ was in Liverpool, while ‘The Sensorites’ was in Runcorn, that much I remember, with ‘The Dominators’ acquired on a day trip to York. DWM also mentioned at one point that a small, primarily legal bookshop in Temple Bar was carrying a large stock of hardbacks at a pound each, so my friend Mike and I called in on a day trip to London, to be pleasantly surprised as the stock they carried went back to 1980 or so and included several of Terrance Dicks’s adaptations of Williams era stories. Not highly regarded as adaptations, but damn hard to get hold of as hardbacks, having only had one print run. Hardbacks were also good for autographs- I have ‘The Giant Robot’ signed by Terrance Dicks, ‘Black Orchid’ by Michael Cochrane, ‘The Time Monster’ by Richard Franklin and so on. But my all time favourite is in ‘Warriors of the Deep’; I’m quoting from memory, but it goes something like : "To Ian, to sign a copy of a book about ‘Warriors’. A story which promised greatly but disappointed for other reasons. Yours sincerely, Johnny Byrne".

But my interest waned after I started reading "proper" books and went to university- I don’t have any of the last sorry efforts of the Target line, released circa 1990 more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. And that was it for a year or two, until the New Adventures started to come out. The Timewyrm series were, if I remember correctly, released bi-monthly- I bought Genesys fairly soon after it came out, from a sense of curiosity more than anything else, but I don’t think I followed it up with the other three until the series was complete. More impressed by the later instalments of the Timewyrm saga, I bought the Cat’s Cradle series as they came out, then pretty much left things as they were- I was at university and it wasn’t a priority, particularly not in my final year. One irony of this, however, is that I insisted on bringing all my books from Bristol back home with me, so regardless of what I’ve lost along the way, I still have the first seven New Adventures in reasonable condition. I picked the thread up again in Canterbury doing my MA, when I more or less caught up with all the New Adventures to date as well as the first Missing Adventures. Tragedy of tragedies, however- I had to leave Canterbury at about a week’s notice (nothing embarrassing- I just had a place on a business course in Liverpool which started a week before I’d reckoned) and they were among the many books I had to leave. I couldn’t begin to count how many I had to leave behind me- I’ve recently saved a battered copy of ‘First Frontier’ from the tip, which was one of them, but there must have been dozens. ‘Human Nature’, of course, ‘System Shock’, ‘Lords of the Storm’, ‘Empire of Glass’, ‘Dancing the Code’ and the vampire duet...I tended to pick and choose, though, and bought the ones with good reviews and any with old monsters before anything else.

And so I moved back to Birkenhead for six months, then off to Leeds to do my teacher training. Living at home and doing a course designed to get you into work meant that my dole was not only boosted by £20 odd a fortnight but also went further, so I started getting back into Who and was buying the books regularly up until the end of the Virgin licence. So I think I have most of the important books from that year- certainly ‘The Dying Days’ and ‘The Well-Mannered War’, but there should be a ‘Lungbarrow’ somewhere too. My only regret is that a sudden house move after teacher training collapsed meant quickly disposing of certain titles, including ‘The Plotters’, which I never started and which I abandoned to its fate on the bookshelf of my ex-landlady and her three-legged cat. And before you ask, no, it wasn’t a Manx. Since then I’ve been mopping up Virgin titles, primarily the ones I never read in the first place; there was a point a couple of years ago where certain remaindered book chains were selling them for £1.99 or so, but the shop I bought them from in Harrogate disappeared between visits. The last place I found that was still selling them was a discount bookshop in Douglas, Isle of Man. They were selling two for a pound- one I bought was ‘The Man in the Velvet Mask’ and the other, I think, was ‘Head Games’- I’ve had to have a look in the box under my bed to refresh my memory. It’s strange how, given their initially reluctant reception, the Virgin novels have been seamlessly absorbed by fandom- you’re lucky to even see more than a couple on eBay, and they tend to go for about 150% of cover price. It’s probably helped by the fact that three of the writers on the new series wrote for the NAs- you try finding a copy of ‘Damaged Goods’ anywhere, I dare you.

I was going to move on to the BBC novels, but they’re far too current for me to be able to get all nostalgic over them. No doubt the Eighth Doctor’s time is starting to run out now and the range will be relaunched for the new Doctor, at which point I can start waxing lyrical about getting ‘The Eight Doctors’ and "Devil Goblins from Neptune’ before the publication date. Two years ago I set myself a target of getting up to date with the Eighth Doctor’s adventures, and now I’m only about a year and a half behind. But I haven’t explained my title yet. To cut a long story short, it goes back to something I did in my teens when I first started getting picky about the condition of my Target books- I sold my earlier editions which, quite frankly, looked as if they’d been read several times by an eleven-year-old, and bought reprints, easily recognisable by the numbering system Target had introduced in the meantime and by being about half a centimetre shorter, for reasons best known to those in the publishing industry at the time. Nothing major came of it- I just sold the old paperbacks off for about 50p a time and bought the nicer reprints, which have sat on a shelf in my old room at my mum and dad’s for the last fifteen years alternately collecting damp or drying out, depending on whether they leave the dehumidifier on or not. But it’s a nice title and it goes well with my previous article.

Having done some teacher training a few years ago, I know that one of the major issues facing teachers of English today is getting boys to read. There are just so many more exciting things to do when you’re a teenage boy- playing football, playing with yourself, listening to music, playing with yourself, vandalising phone boxes, playing with yourself...It’s as if the entire world has forgotten that Terrance Dicks and co knew exactly how to get boys to read. Take a TV programme they all watch, tighten the writing up and make them into slightly scary, slightly gory thrillers and they’ll lap it up. Until somebody remembers that, the thrills and spills of buying Target novels will be a fond memory and little more.