TARDIS Instruction Manual

The Fourth Doctor reads his TARDIS Handbook. (DW: The Horns of Nimon)

A TARDIS Instruction Manual, also known as a TARDIS Manual or TARDIS Handbook, was a book that instructed in the piloting and workings a TARDIS.

The Doctor's manual

The Doctor's TARDIS had an instruction manual, but the Doctor rarely looked at it.

The TARDIS Instruction Manual that belonged to the First Doctor was one of the segments of the Key to Time. (DWM: Time & Time Again)

The Fourth Doctor owned a handbook that had been specified to the Type 40 model and read from it: "when making modifications, it is extremely important to shut everything down, except that which it is not necessary to shut down". (DW: The Horns of Nimon) The Doctor tended to disagree heavily with the manual, at one point even ripping out one of its pages. (DW: The Pirate Planet)

Tegan tried to understand the manual when she accidentally set the TARDIS in flight while trying to get herself off of the Monarch's ship. She called it gibberish, eventually throwing it to the floor and stamping on it. (DW: Four to Doomsday)

The Sixth Doctor consults the manual. (DW: Vengeance on Varos)

Peri Brown found a TARDIS handbook propping open a vent in the Sixth Doctor's workshop; he admitted that he'd started reading it once. On Peri's urging he was able to use it to figure their way out of a power failure. (DW: Vengeance on Varos)

When an alien creature attempted to get into the TARDIS, the Seventh Doctor tried consulting the manual for help. However, the creature had already breached the ship's dimensional interfaces, which included time, and therefore it had already destroyed the manual even though it had not yet done so. (NA: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible)

The Eighth Doctor had a quick-start guide, while the manual itself had its own street in the TARDIS. (BFA: Orbis) Sarah Jane Smith had once happened upon a room in the Eighth Doctor's TARDIS where several thousand volumes of the TARDIS Instruction Manual were kept; she took this to mean the single book she had seen the Fourth Doctor use was just the introductory volume. (EDA: Interference - Book Two)

Fey Truscott-Sade once used the Eighth Doctor's manual to pilot the TARDIS to Gallifrey, (DWM: The Final Chapter) although the Doctor later revealed that the Threshold had secretly guided her actions by giving her an implant that allowed her to read the manual, which was printed in Gallifreyan. (DWM: Wormwood)

The Eleventh Doctor admitted that at some point, he'd disagreed with the manual so much that he threw it into a supernova. (DW: Amy's Choice)

Other information

• There was no information about an emergency stop in the manual. (DW: The Infinite Quest)