Christopher Wilson rightly commends Kate Hepburn’s versatile command of graphic and typographical pastiche. Also vital to the success of the books she designed was her imaginative sympathy for the style and humour of the writers whose work she guided from performance to page.
Both as art editor under Derek Birdsall for Monty Python’s Big Red Book (1971) as it took shape in a collection of pages pinned to Derek’s studio wall in Covent Garden, and as solo art director of The Brand New Monty Python Bok (1973), orchestrating a farrago of pictorial and verbal components in a large studio space in New Fetter Lane, she found a way to confront the reader, at each turn of the page, with, graphically, “something completely different”.
For Ripping Yarns (1978), by Michael Palin and Terry Jones, her approach was different. Her typography and graphics alluded throughout, with subtle cunning, to the style and tone of books of a bygone era, the boyhood reading that inspired the films that made up the series.
A similar sympathy for the style of a trio of writer-performers and their material appeared years later in Hepburn’s design for The Joy of Sequins (1994), the Fascinating Aida songbook. She knew her craft.
