Tardis Instruction Manual

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. The Fourth Doctor owned a handbook specific to the Type 40 model. While making modifications to the TARDIS he read aloud the passage "when making modifications, it's extremely important to shut everything down, except that which is not necessary to shut down" and commented that he found it quite sensible.  On other occasions the Doctor disagreed strongly with the manual, at one point even tearing out one of its pages. 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, finally throwing it to the floor and stamping on it.

Peri Brown found a TARDIS handbook propping open a vent in the Sixth Doctor's workshop; he admitted he'd started reading it once. On Peri's urging he used it to figure their way out of a power failure. When an alien creature tried to get into the TARDIS, the Seventh Doctor consulted the manual for help. However, the creature had already breached the ship's dimensional interfaces, which included time, and so had already destroyed the manual even though it had not yet done so. The Eighth Doctor had a quick-start guide, while the manual itself had its own street in the TARDIS. 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. Fey Truscott-Sade once used the Eighth Doctor's manual to pilot the TARDIS to Gallifrey, 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. The Eleventh Doctor admitted that, at some point, he'd disagreed with the manual so much that he threw it into a supernova.