“Come on, you Target for faraway laughter.”

It would be remiss for a Doctor Who Substack to not mark the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved Target Books Doctor Who novelisation range. The golden jubilee of the day in 1973 when three long-out-of-print novelisations of 1960s Doctor Who serials were reissued by the children’s imprint of Universal-Tandem. Target Books had only just been established, and Universal-Tandem were presumably looking for a cheap date, yet Doctor Who And The Daleks, Doctor Who And The Zarbi and Doctor Who And The Crusaders sold. And sold. And sold.

Maybe it was Chris Achilléos’ astonishing covers. Maybe it was that Doctor Who on television was experiencing a period of renewed popularity after its late sixties decline. Maybe it was that they’re all really good children’s books. Or maybe it was all three. Curiously, yet wonderfully, Achilléos’ covers featured portraits of William Hartnell, the first Doctor Who, on whose television adventures the books were based, rather than 1973’s incumbent Doctor, Jon Pertwee. Pertwee pictures had, it seems, been the original plan1. But fidelity won out.

Instinctively, that’s bad marketing. Purity over mass appeal. But it didn’t damage sales. Maybe it helped. Hartnell had, after all, made a splendid cameo in The Three Doctors, the opening story of the 1973 series, and nearly 12m people, had seen him do so. Did the children of 1973 fall on these books out of a sudden need to know about the deep history of the favourite series they’d just discovered had been around longer than they had? I like to think so. It would nicely prefigure the role they would come to play later in Doctor Who’s history.

Those reprints success prompted Target to commission new novelisations of more recent Doctor Who stories, this time featuring Pertwee’s Doctor on both the covers and the inside pages, and they were published in January 1974. Two more followed in March. Then another two in October. The range was soon almost monthly, and a mainstay of school and county libraries across the land. It was still both when I first encountered Doctor Who books well over a decade after they’d begun.