Any Doctor Who fan of a certain age will tell you that they were an essential purchase. Those slender paperbacks were a gateway to a seemingly lost paradise of previous Doctors, black-and-white worlds and forgotten monsters. The distinguishing mark on the spines of all these books? A colourful logo in the shape of a target.
Searching for the Target logo certainly made scanning the shelves of bookshops and jumble sales easier. I would zero in on the logo before I even clocked the title of the book, because for me Doctor Who was more closely associated with Target than anything else – even the BBC.
Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock was the first one I read, and soon after I purchased Destiny of the Daleks from a book club at my junior school. Then I began receiving the novelisations as gifts. I vividly recall my excitement at returning home one afternoon to find a present concealed within a sealed paper bag. Inside was a copy of Revenge of the Cybermen. I devoured the text and pored over the illustration on the front.