A send-up of a 1964 high school yearbook, made by National Lampoon in 1974

In 1974 the humour magazine National Lampoon published a high school yearbook from 1964 that never existed. It is called Kaleidoscope and copies the look and tone of the genuine article, down to a cast list that credits a real person for each invented student, from Susan Franks as Patricia Ann Albright to Andrew Friend as Herbert Leonard Weisenheimer.

The jokes spill beyond the yearbook. The cover promises a school newspaper, a literary magazine, a basketball programme, a report card, a diploma, detention slips, a fake ID and a cootie catcher, among much else, all billed as new material. The small print calls the issue Volume 1, Number 6 in a series the magazine brought out three times a year. For a reader now it is a double portrait: an early-sixties American high school, as the magazine’s writers chose to remember and mock it a decade on.

This copy has been read and handled. The pictorial outer wrapper and the red cover are creased and scuffed, with small tears, the spine has lost colour, and the pages are toned. Whether every detachable extra is still present has not been checked. The grey disc in some photographs is a loose cap used to mask part of the cover picture; it is not included.