Doctor Who: The Complete History is arguably the most ambitious reference work ever compiled about this, or any other, television series.

FEATURE BY EMILY COOK

Published by Panini in collaboration with Hachette Partworks, Doctor Who: The Complete History is a comprehensive Doctor Who partwork that launched in September 2015 and is released fortnightly as a series of lavish hardback books. The Complete History claims to be ‘The definitive guide to the making of Doctor Who’.

“There are so many wonderful books devoted to the history of Doctor Who, but a partwork has the beauty of building up across many volumes, so there can be a more detail,” says co-editor Mark Wright. “And not to put too fine a point on it, as Doctor Who fans we are collectors. We like having things that line up and look pretty on the shelf – and that can be pulled out and read again and again.”

John Ainsworth (above) and Mark Wright are joint editors of the partwork Doctor Who: The Complete History.

Mark co-edits The Complete History alongside John Ainsworth, who was initially approached to be the sole editor of a partwork which would be based on Andrew Pixley’s Doctor Who Magazine Archive features. “Andrew’s DWM Archives were published over a very long period of time,” John points out. “There was no real consistency in the way they were presented, so there was a lot of interest in the idea of republishing and updating the Archives in some form, and this ultimately led to the decision to turn them into a partwork.

”The challenge of editing a partwork comes right at the beginning. The whole series has to be carefully planned out.” John Ainsworth

“The challenge of editing a partwork publication comes right at the very beginning. The whole series of books has to be carefully planned out, deciding exactly what will go in each book, and how many pages each book will be. It’s initially a lot of work, but if it’s done well and you’ve devised a realistic production schedule, then the day-to-day work becomes easier.