Preemptive reading would spoil plot developments up to several years in advance of BBC repeats reaching those points, while postmortem reading would fill me in on interesting trivia I'd forget by the time I got around to watching a series again. Here's a bit of both.
Allen Eyles, The House of Horror: The Story of Hammer Films
1973 / Ebook / 128 pages / UK
***
I enjoy Hammer horrors, but could never be bothered to go through them all. This admirably concise filmography does it for me, interestingly capturing the exact moment when the studio became irrelevant and hit its sharp decline – something its new boss was clearly oblivious to with his lofty cross-platform ambitions for the brand. After reading dry interviews with the important men behind it all, your patience is rewarded with a photo gallery of Hammer babes and boobs. I'm sure this was a big hit with young fans at the time, they love behind-the-scenes trivia.
Bruce Dessau, The Official Red Dwarf Companion
***
Having already dog-eared a Red Dwarf Programme Guide for a couple of years before finding this second-hand in the late 90s, this official but less thorough and outdated alternative (up to series five only and never updated) was mainly notable for all the behind-the-scenes photos. Reading again decades later, courtesy of an archive.org scan, it was mainly notable for all the little mistakes.
Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion: A Dreamer's Guide to the Award-winning Comics Series
****
I re-read Sandman again again intermittently over the past year, not bothering to document my thoughts since I already went overboard the first time. This giddy guide from a knowledgeable fan has extensive elaborations from Gaiman himself every few pages, demystifying the metamyth slightly but making me appreciate some of it even more. It was also interesting to get a snapshot of the contemporary consensus on what were seen as the best and least best runs of the series, those 90s idiots.
J. F. Roberts, The True History of the Black Adder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend
*****
You couldn't ask for a more in-depth oral history of a classic sitcom, exploring every branch of the comic royalty's family tree before, during and after their memorable reign, cunningly getting in there before they started dying. Elsewhere, the chronicler's in-character alt-history postulations are brief enough to be fun rather than annoying interludes and it's padded out at the back with photos and thankfully-unproduced scripts, which is just showing off, really.
