Above are six beautiful covers for the magazine Thousand and One Nights, which was published out of Beirut, Lebanon, a city that was once known as the Paris of the Middle East. These issues are all circa mid-1930s, when the country was under French control. We don’t recognize all the actresses, but we can identify Jean Harlow in panel two and Mae West in panel four (no big trick there, since her name actually appears in English). You may remember we shared some covers from another magazine of the same name published in Japan. If you missed that, maybe click over there and have a look. It’s well worth it. As for the Lebanese Thousand and One Nights, we found about two dozen issues and they’re all quite interesting, especially the way the logo design changes each time. We’ll share more of these down the line. 

This publicity photo from Warner Bros. shows six members of the studio’s beauty chorus posing on a ladder that was part of a pirate ship being used in the 1933 Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade. This is not the first time this movie has been mentioned on Pulp Intl. We shared an excellent magazine cover related to it last year. Among the chorus girls who appeared in the film were nineteen-year-old Dorothy Lamour and twenty-two-year-old Ann Sothern, both just beginning their careers. The women above are not identified, but if we had to guess we’d say Lamour could be third from the top.

Above are a couple of scans from an issue of The National Police Gazette published this month in 1963 with cover star Ava Gardner. Gardner had been living in Spain and hadn’t been in a movie in three years, but was about to appear in the historical war drama 55 Days at Peking with Charleton Heston and David Niven. The Gazette discusses how she’d gotten fed up with the U.S.—particularly the American press. She had been particularly annoyed by the rumor that she was involved with Sammy Davis, Jr., a story that took flight after several magazines published photos of the two holding hands. When asked why she was returning to Hollywood after being out of circulation for so long, Gardner, in typically blunt fashion, replied, “I need the money.”

All Castro needs at that point is a Lacoste sweater and a fraternity paddle and his transformation into pure evil would be complete. But as fanciful as the story seems, Lisa really did exist. Her real name was Marita Lorenz and she was Castro’s live-in mistress for several months in 1959. While Lorenz herself never suggested she was ever raped by Castro, the two did have a falling out around the issue of her unplanned pregnancy, which was terminated in its sixth month. Lorenz later said the abortion was forced on her while she was drugged; Castro’s associates claim that she wanted it. Lorenz went on to join anti-Castro activists in the U.S., and on a fundraising visit with the deposed Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, became involved with him. She was still traveling to and from Cuba, and was recruited by the CIA for a Castro assassination attempt. But instead of poisoning his food, like she’d been instructed, she abandoned the plot, supposedly because she still felt strongly for him. Lorenz later wrote about all this in two autobiographies.

In 1977, Lorenz told the New York Daily News that she met Lee Harvey Oswald in autumn 1963 at a CIA safe house in Miami. She claimed she met him again weeks later along with a group of anti-Castro Cubans and they had Dallas street maps. We all know what happened next. Lorenz eventually testified about this before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, but her story was deemed unreliable. We suppose bouncing between two dictators and acting as a double agent will tend toraise a red flag with American congressmen, though these things have no bearing on whether she was telling the truth. It’s interesting though, isn’t it? You’d think that if a single man of his own accord assassinated another man the surrounding circumstances wouldn’t be so… labyrinthine. Yet lurking near the supposed black swan event of the Kennedy killing were double-agents like Lorenz, spooks like E. Howard Hunt, underworld figures like Eladio Ceferino del Valle and others. Just saying. In any case, we’ll have more from the Police Gazette and more on Fidel Castro soon.

Rampage is not the most visual of tabloids, but the stories are colorful enough to make up for it. Of those, there’s one clear winner in this issue published today in 1973. It deals with a live sex show in “the Casbah,” presumably Morocco, in which a girl teaches a monkey oral sex by shoving a banana inside her vagina. Once the chimp reaches third base, it’s only a matter of time before he slides into home. We’ll let Rampage scribe Casey Coozer (uh, right) describe the climax, so to speak, of the story: “Now came the best part of the show. As the audience watched these monkeyshines on stage, a troupe of Casbah whores took each man in the crowd and [snip] started blowing us right there. The ape is balling, the chicks are blowing, and at the end it seemed like everyone came at the same time. God, the fucking noise was unbelievable. [snip] The whore onstage is going absolutely bananas, the monkey is screaming like he just woke up with a leopard’s jaws around his head, and everybody, I mean everybody, is creaming!”

Nothing much we can say about that except we never saw anything of the sort during our trip to Morocco. Would we actually want to see chimp on human sex? Well no, but we still have to wonder if it might be preferable to having a knife-scarred maniac utter these words to us: “You talk big now, but next time I see you I’m going to kill you.” Monkeysex or murder threat? Hmm, tough call. Elsewhere in Rampage there’s an amusing story about sexual promiscuity in the Greek isles, more bestial action involving a woman and a cocker spaniel (accompanied by a nice shot of British glamour model and actress Sylvia Bayo, aka Lucienne Camille), and the tale of a woman held captive in a Haitian sex camp. A while back we posted an issue of Rampage from 1969 and said the paper promised but didn’t deliver. Amazing what four years and a loosening of American obscenity laws can do. This Rampage delivers all the madness and mayhem anyone could want. Of course, another change from 1969 is that the paper now bears a slogan: “America’s top satire and humor weekly.” In other words, the stories are made up—as if the fact that they used Bayo to illustrate their shaggy dog story didn't give it away. But what imaginations these guys had. Ten scans below.

One of the most reclusive writers in the world has been forced to step into the public eye because of what she claims was a carefully orchestrated swindle. Harper Lee, author of the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird, filed suit in a Manhattan court against a man she says stole rights to her book. Lee’s lawsuit details how Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of her longtime agent Eugene Winick, tricked Lee into transferring the copyright on her 1960 masterpiece. In 2002 Eugene Winick was ill and Pinkus began folding some of his father-in-law’s clients into his own literary agency. In 2007 Pinkus took advantage of Lee’s failing eyesight and hearing to transfer Lee’s rights to himself, assuming irrevocable interest in the income derived from To Kill A Mockingbird, and offering no payment to the author. Lee signed the crucial papers when she was recuperating from a stroke. In 2012 she took legal action and regained the copyright, but Pinkus still derives income from sales of the book though he is no longer Lee’s agent. The lawsuit says Lee has no memory of agreeing to anything, and frankly, any neutral observer would find it hard to disbelieve her.

Since this is a website, not a court, we’ll just say what other stories about this haven’t yet—Samuel Pinkus thought Harper Lee was going to die and stole her book. With Lee dead, and very little likelihood such a private individual would have discussed the matter with anyone, there would have been nobody to dispute his ownership of a revered, Pulitzer Prize-winning gold mine. When she recovered and realized what had happened, Pinkus scrambled to give the copyright back but had arranged to keep raking money off the top in perpetuity—his backup plan. Pinkus, naturally, has had no comment on the lawsuit, and presumably won’t until the Manhattan court has to decide whether his scam will stand. In this age of trillion dollar bank swindles, naked buy-offs of elected officials, and rampant court corruption, we don’t have high hopes for Ms. Lee. In fact, we suspect that in the aforementioned circles Samuel Pinkus is being hailed as a genius.

Usually we take pains to post rare femme fatale images, if not shots that have never appeared on the internet before, but sometimes you gotta make exceptions, especially when there’s very little chance of improving on existing photos. Such is the case with the above images of American model and actress Joi Lansing in a skirted bikini. She posed in this suit a few times, and never have polka dots looked so good. In the 1950s there were the Monroes and Mansfields, but people who say actresses were generally more curvaceous are wrong. Curves were an ideal, but for every Monroe and Mansfield there were women like Linda Darnell and Joi Lansing who had what would today be considered ideal physiques. These shots are actually later Lansing, made for her role in the 1965 comedy Marriage on the Rocks, when she was thirty-seven years old.

Sometimes, when you’re looking at a stack of vintage magazines about a hundred high the work of scanning seems overwhelming. For days like those, the website Darwination is truly a lifesaver. It used to post full scans of vintage magazines but the site has been idle for nearly a year. In any case, here’s another of their great offerings, a copy of Whisper published in May 1950. Cover artist Peter Driben uses a common pulp/men’s magazine motif—the big ass keyhole. In fact, we’ve been putting together a collection of these keyhole-themed covers we’ll show you later. The link to download this Whisper has died, but we’ve got a bunch of great scans below for your enjoyment this Saturday. We’ll return to scanning our own magazine stack soon.