TOYHEM doesn’t have to be strictly about toys… — Welcome to TOYHEM! For the fifth straight holiday season, we’re bringing you a series of features and columns celebrating the toys of our youth, which often made for the best memories this time of year. Click here to check out the complete index of stories — and have a Merry Christmas, a Happy Chanukah and Happy Holidays! — Dan — By JIM BEARD I’ve always loved media tie-in books, especially novels based on popular television shows and movies. That interest began with the Whitman Authorized TV Adventure books of the 1960s and early 1970s. Now, I grant you that getting a book for the holidays isn’t necessarily something that every kid yearned for, but for me it was an important part of my Christmas “gets” and I appreciated each and every one of them—especially if they were connected with a property I loved. The Whitman hardcovers are an odd lot, but that makes them even more special to me. They hit a ton of the biggest shows back in the day, but also missed some (Batman, I’m looking at you), which makes for an eclectic line-up of titles. What’s even cooler is that the series represents some of the first and only prose fiction of the properties it included, and that fiction is rarely juvenile. The books are short, but they don’t talk down to their audience. Some of it is relatively sophisticated stuff. I picked out 13 of the nearly 100 editions in the series; some I had as a kid, and others I collected along the way as an “adult.” Hope you spot a few you’ll want to look for and include in your own tie-in collections. — Star Trek: Mission to Horatius. By Mack Reynolds, illustrated by Sparky Moore. Talk about a place to start this line-up! This is the very first original Star Trek prose fiction novel ever, and, as far as I know, the only Whitman Authorized TV Adventure to be reprinted in modern times. — Family Affair: Buffy Finds a Star. By Gladys Baker Bond, illustrated by Michael Lowenbein. I’m pretty sure this was the only Family Affair entry in the series. New adventures of Mr. French! — Dragnet: Case Histories from the Popular Television Series. By Richard Deming, illustrated by Dan Goozee. Not an actual novel,...