YOU'VE heard of coffee table books? Well, this massive tome is hefty enough to be a table in its own right.

At the outset, author and Who buff Justin Richards stresses that the book is not an exhaustive dissection of the series and its impact on popular culture.

To do that would probably have meant having to publish another few hundred books this huge. So, what we get here is an extremely lavish episode guide, interspersed with profiles of the eight actors who have played the Time Lord since Doctor Who first graced our TV screens 40 years ago.

Richards is a long time fan of the series and actually met second doctor Patrick Troughton on a visit to the set in the sixties at the tender age of eight. In this 40th anniversary special he summarises each of the show's 158 TV stories from that opening episode on November 23, 1963 (when William Hartnell played the titular character) up until its cancellation in 1989 (when Sylvester McCoy was at the helm as the seventh actor to take the role).

He also devotes some coverage to the 1996 one-off TV movie starring Paul McGann as the latest incarnation of the good Doc and there are asides on companions, special effects, music and some fascinating behind the scenes snippets.

For the Dr Who fanatic, there is probably little by way of facts that haven't been included elsewhere in the hundreds of publications devoted to the series, which became embedded in the public psyche with the appearance of the Doctor's most famous enemies, the dreaded Daleks, early in the first season.

But what makes this 368 page monster such an indispensable purchase (even though the price tag of forty quid is enough to make a Cyberman quiver in his silver wellies) is its collection of photographs.

There are many here among the 500 that have never been seen before and some have been borrowed from private collections.

The BBC recently announced that the series was due to make a return to TV in the next year or so, with scripts from the Queer As Folk witer Russell T Davies.

And last week there was an animated Dr Who 'webcast' on BBC online, starring the voice of Richard E Grant as the Doctor.

If all goes well, the Doctor could once again become telly's must-see weekly programme and, who knows, the show could run for another 40 years.

If it does, though, an 80 Years Of Dr Who book will have to be split into two volumes; no human would be strong enough to pick it up, let alone read it.

Doctor Who: The Legend by Justin Richards (BBC Books, £40)