On Target

..... hang on, someone's taken that name already!

Around the time Logopolis aired (I'd have been 7) I ventured into my local library - which would have been the branch in Tudor Drive, Kingston - and looked for some books on Doctor Who.

I walked out with a copy of Giant Robot and loved it.

Over the next few months I worked my way through their stock of Doctor Who books - Destiny of the Daleks (so scared of it still, I hid it in a cupboard), Planet of Spiders, Planet of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, Sontaran Experiment, Tomb of the Cybermen, The Web of Fear (the actual copy I read from the library now sits on a shelf in our house, as does Castrovalva - they were withdrawn from lending and put out for sale, I didn't half inch them!) and many others.

Come birthday time I was bought 2 books: Destiny of the Daleks (again, was I not traumatised enough Mother?) and Day of the Daleks.  Many more followed: My first Troughton was The Cybermen (from a book shop on Brook Street Kingston) while the first Hartnell book was Tenth Planet (WHS in Richmond - massive strop when I couldn't decide between that & Dalek Invasion Of Earth - DIOE was sneakily bought by my mother at the same time and later presented to me to keep me quiet at a wedding).

Hardcovers I owned were rare in my life, though a sale at Volume 1 in Kingston netted a few (later replaced with paperbacks and recently sold on eBay for a HUGE ammount)

Today I've got a complete set of Target novels sitting on my bookshelf.