This brand new (rather old now, actually) Papperbok contains a wide selection of very silly things in the vein of good old Monty Python humour, which anyone who reads this bo(o)k should be quite familiar with from the Flying Circus (If you haven't seen the Flying Circus, shame on you! Go and do that first before considering the papperboks!). Attention to detail became a matter of pride. ‘The closer the pastiche was to the real thing, the better the gag would work,’ says Hepburn. ‘We became interested in the tension between how something looked and what was being said.’ A good example was the Radio Times-style report on the ‘Upper Class Twit of the Year Race’. Idle remembers: ‘That was a case of slotting something into a context. On the TV show we’d used a documentary format; here, it was the Radio Times.’ Hepburn continues: ‘The typeface, layout and design were all as close as possible to the magazine, even down to the rather poorly produced photos.’ One of the most original and groundbreaking humor classics of all time, the Papperbok was compiled for Methuen in the early 1970s by the young Monty Python team at the height of their surreal powers and was published on the heels of the improbable success of the Monty Python's Flying Circus television series. While it's a lot longer than the first one (Monty Python's Big Red Book, which had a lot more tie-ins to the television series) the average quality seems a little lower this time around. Everything is still very pythonesque and there are still a few real screamers, but some articles or stories are just too lengthy and stop being funny long before they're done. Additionally some of them aren't just long, but also seem forced, making them a chore to get through. The Pythons' first book ingeniously captured the spirit of the series, while also playing with the parameters of a printed book. Despite the title, it has little in common with Chairman Mao's "Little Red Book" (or even with the color red).

Derek Birdsall and Katy Hepburn were responsible for the graphic design and layout, incorporating many of Gilliam's illustrations. Additional photography - Camera Press, Hulton Picture Library, Barnaby Picture Library, The Mansell Collection, Graphic House Inc.Postmodernism, you say? Sounds like the kind of thing that would have been mercilessly lampooned in the ‘philosophers’ football match’ sketch. But some learned writers have dated the emergence of this form of cultural collaging to exactly the period in which the Bok was taking shape. David Harvey, for example, in his famous study The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) pinpoints 1972 as the moment when a ‘sea-change’ began to occur ‘in cultural as well as social-economic practices’. The Pythons’ penchant for pastiching, parodying, collaging and re-contextualising (most evident in the Bok) could all fit nicely into this theory. But then again, if the Pythons were postmodern, does that mean the Goons were, too? As Mr Gumby might say: ‘My brain hurts.’ For a lot of us growing up post-Python but pre-netflix (or even DVD's), the books were an essential part of python. They were accessible and could be read over and over again. There would be other books, but none was as iconic. The Pythons went on to do adaptations of their films ( Holy Grail, Life of Brian, Meaning of Life), while rivals tried to imitate their success – the lamentable Goodies book was an object lesson in how not to do it. But for the most part, it was a case of ‘and now for something completely the same’, and by the time alternative comedy came along in the late 1970s the formula was definitely looking past-it. Only the Viz volumes in the 1980s and 90s managed to revive some of that early comedic punch (Michael Palin sent Viz a note of congratulation, saying, ‘Your organ has given me greater pleasure than my own’ 2). The editor of the Big Red Book was to be Eric Idle, and there would be contributions from the other Pythons, most especially from Terry Gilliam, whose illustrations would form the visual focal point. The design team was headed by Derek Birdsall, one of the leading art directors of the day and a friend of Idle’s, along with art editor Katy Hepburn, sister-in-law of Terry Jones, who was still a student at the RCA, but who was already working with Gilliam on animations for the show.

There were a lot of them being published at the time, and they were ripe for a bashing,’ says Hepburn. ‘Again, we wanted to be as accurate as possible, so a lot of time was spent on the cover, for example.’ (Which includes the teasers: ‘Short Story: The Deodorant, by Constance MacPseudonym’ and ‘Grand Competition: Win a Thousand Deodorants’, etc.) She continues: ‘Then inside, we commissioned Peter Brookes to do a semi-realistic illustration, to accompany a preposterous romantic story, so that the magazine would seem more authentic, and also so the book wouldn’t look too uniform, like it was all Terry’s work.’ Monty Python's Big Red Book is a humour book comprising mostly material derived and reworked from the first two series of the Monty Python's Flying Circus BBC television series. [1] Edited by Eric Idle, it was first published in the UK in 1971 by Methuen Publishing Ltd. It was later published in the United States in 1975 by Warner Books.Shortly after publication the book ran into trouble when a music publishing company objected to the use of their trade name being used on the "Bing Tiddle Tiddle Bong" sheet music. After the first 75,000 copies were sold, all subsequent editions removed the reference to "The Wright Ukulele Tutor" and replaced it with "The Volti Subito". [2] Were the Pythons really connecting with the counterculture at this time? There was probably some sympathy among individual members. But beyond Gilliam’s underground sensibility, it’s hard to detect a particular emphasis on utopian politics. Hepburn explains: ‘The Pythons were a BBC act, and were considered so extreme that they were censored several times. That meant they couldn’t go as far as the underground even if they wanted to. It was about jokes.’