Doctor Who and the Sunmakers, the last 'and' and the last, if you exclude fannying about with Hartnell titles including Mission to the Unknown and The Mutation of Time, divergence from a TV title - the last seemingly casual divergence, if you will.
That 'and' is a curious thing. It's clearly, at least to me, a marker of children's literature, still seen this century in, for example, the Harry Potter series. I most strongly associate it with Asterix, where the convention doesn't seem in play in the originals (I've chosen Asterix and the Black Gold as it was the most recent publication when Doctor Who and the Sunmakers came out), which makes me think it's something of a British, or at least English language, convention.
Actually, when the Who range started, going back to Mueller and Doctor Who and the Zarbi, it might have been a general indicator of series of books featuring a repeated protagonist - the Maigret novel Pietr-le-Letton is translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett in 1963 while the 1933 translation was simply titled The Strange Case of Peter the Lett (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strange_Case_of_Peter_the_Lett). However, there seems to be a stronger tradition for this format in children's titles, even where the book was not necessarily part of a series, such as Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach in 1964. Perhaps the most obvious example feels like the Biggles books and, as if feeding the sense that this was a convention that hit its peak in the 1960s, though it first uses the 'and the' format in 1953 and once again in 1954, it only really embraces it in the 1960s, using it in 14 out of the 30 books published that decade (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biggles).
Complicating the focus on both the 60s and English is Erich Kästner's 1929 novel Emil and the Detectives. Contrary to what I said in light of French publications, the original German title follows the same format, Emil und die Detektive, and feels like it does so specifically to mark the work as children's fiction. I don't really know what to do with that wrinkle but there you go.
Focusing on English language works, the titling tradition seems to owe its origins to fairy stories, the earliest example I can find being 1734's 'The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean' (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_and_the_Beanstalk) in Round about our Coal Fire (en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Round_about_our_Coal_Fire,_or,_Christmas_Entertainments,_4th_edn,_1734.pdf&page=1). That said, chivalric romance may have a claim - the late 14th-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may not have gained its title until 'centuries later' (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight) but it's less clear when circa 1400 Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle gained its title - and its easy to imagine a series of '[knight of the round table] and the [thing]' tales. Either way, a folk story tradition would seem to lie behind the convention.
Back to Who. What I find sad about the demise of the 'and' titles, much as I acknowledge Doctor Who and Delta and the Bannermen or even Doctor Who and Survival would have been awkward titles, is the fact that it signals the books opting out of this tradition and so distancing themselves, however mildly, from children's literature. It also represents the ultimate rejection of Doctor Who as the protagonist's name, which was always a fun bit of nonsense. Alongside this, the fact that the TV titles will now be sacrosanct represents the embrace of a now petrified list - even as the advent of home videos diminishes the need for the novelisations to adhere closely with the broadcast serials, their status as monuments to those stories is strengthened. What's more, my campaign for the title 'War of God' withers here in 1982.
Anyway, Doctor Who and the Sunmakers...
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