Non-fiction books about the series

[rulandor]

Since I first discovered Doctor Who around Christmas 2012, I have watched all of the new series and several dozen adventures of "old Who". Mostly these adventures have been chosen for random references in the DVD extras (which I watch with nearly the same fascination as the adventures themselves) and the TARDIS files wiki.

Now I am looking for a book about the series, preferably a detailed one concerning all of the 50 years in real-life- and in-series-content - especially one being useful as a reference book about all episodes, the characters and actors, and also listing (in contrast to the wonderful DWAITAS doctor books) novels, comics, audio books and spin-offs like Torchwood or Faction Paradox. Three books from the current year made it onto my list, but I can't decide which one would be the best value for my money:

THE VAULT
DOCTOR WHO - HIS LIFE AND TIMES
ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO 50 YEARS

Any advice?

[misterharry]

You'll be hard pressed to find a single book to cover all this. However...

The Television Guide from Telos Publishing is probably the definitive guide to the classic TV series. They have also published a number of guides covering the new series, one book a year starting with Back to the Vortex covering the 2005 series, plus guides for Torchwood.

Telos Publishing: Doctor Who

For the novels, Mad Norwegian Press published a 3-volume series called I, Who which covered the novels and novellas from Virgin, Telos and BBC Books up to late 2002. They're out of print now, so you'll probably need to scour ebay. I can't think of a guide covering the more recent books.

For audios, some were also covered in the I, Who series. But Big Finish have more recently published two Big Finish Companions, which are story-by-story guides, but only to their own releases of course. Also a guide to the Bernice Summerfield stories, The Inside Story.

Big Finish: Factual Books

For comics, Telos have published volume one of The Comic Strip Companion, which covers up to 1979 - further volumes are to follow. See the Telos link above.

Finally, Obverse Books are publishing a series called The 500 Year Diary, which will cover all stories in all formats and media in chronological order of release/publication. Volume One goes up to 1973 and is currently only available as an ebook - the hard copy is at the printers. I've not yet received my copy of this, so can't comment on its comprehensiveness, but it sounds like it should be an excellent reference for the more obscure stories:

Obverse Books: The 500 Year Diary

[rulandor]

Thank you very much for this advice. This is a lot of reading stuff. But well, it looks so interesting, and I tend to start with the two-volume Telos book about the original series.

[misterharry]

There are also a few online guides you may find useful:

For novels:

The Discontinuity Guide

For audios:

The DiscContinuity Guide

For comics:

Altered Vistas

And general:

The Doctor Who Reference Guide

The TARDIS Data Core

[rulandor]

The Doctor Who Reference Guide got bookmarked immediately.

Astounding thing. On first browsing, I already found an episode with my favorite actor from Blakes 7 in it, Paul Darrow. Fantastic.