 I know I'm an unorthodox teacher, officer. But if she thinks this is tough how is she ever gonna handle a left turn in traffic? 
Today we have another issue of our favorite men's magazine Adam, this time from July 1971. Inside there's the usual fiction, true adventure, and cheesecake, including British model Susan Shaw. But this issue is also a little different—it dips into celebrity waters with a write-up on Aly Khan, the Muslim prince whose romantic hook-ups included Gene Tierney, Bettina Graziani, and Rita Hayworth, who he married in 1949. The cover illustration is paired with the short story "Blonde for Bait," by Dick Love. Yeah. Dick Love. This makes the 56th issue of Adam we've uploaded to our website. Enjoy Dick and more in thirty-two scans below, and see all the other issues just by clicking the keywords at bottom.                                
 You two stop fighting or I won't let either of you rub sunscreen on my back. 
We got lazy about scanning again, but today we're back to Australia's Adam magazine with an issue published this month in 1970. The cover illustrates Mark Bannerman's sea adventure “Day of the Knife,” in which a habitual troublemaker is released from an island prison by a connected police official on the condition that he recover a cache of Spanish gold. The gold happens to be aboard a ship that sank a hundred years ago in shark infested waters. This isn't actually the major problem. The more serious issue is that he strikes up an affair with the wife of the rich man sponsoring the expedition, and quickly learns the wife wants her husband dead. Since they'll be at sea together, what better time to do it than during the diving operation? But when he eventually feeds the husband to hungry sharks the femme fatale reverses course, accuses him of murdering her husband out of jealousy, and gets him tossed back in jail. It's only when he's sentenced to death at his trial that he realizes it isn't just the wife who set him up, but the police official too—the pair had been lovers all along. It's pretty straightforward stuff as adventure fiction goes, and not well written, but enjoyable just the same. Other tales in the magazine are better. We have dozens of issues of Adam in the website, so if you want to see more from this publication just click the keywords at bottom.                                   
 See you later alliga— Whoa... whoops... 
We have another issue of Adam magazine today, just because we love it so much and have dozens we haven't shared yet. Inside this one, which appeared this month in 1973, is an interesting article about the practice of scalping. Writer Paul Brock notes that English puritans scalped foes in Europe and brought the idea to North America. He says enraged Native Americans promptly retaliated by doing the same. He doesn't get this quite right, though. Scalping is not something that can be said to have been invented by anyone, because evidence of the practice goes back millennia in various parts of the world. But European colonists industrialized and monetized scalping in North America, incentivizing the mass murder of Native Americans by offering bounties, including on children. And of course, as often happens with atrocities, propagandists vilified the other side for doing it. Even during colonial times Indians were labeled as vicious savages who scalped whites, and to this day most people still don't realize that it was whites who expanded and normalized the practice. So there's a little holiday cheer for you. Elsewhere in the issue you get the usual assortment of fiction, glamour photography, and cartoons. Including today's upload we have fifty four—yes 54—issues of Adam in our website. Why? Because we think it's the coolest men's adventure magazine ever published.                              
 You brute! Why don't you enslave someone your own size! 
Above, more Down Under goodness from Australia's Adam magazine, with a cover from this month in 1969 depicting a scene from Mark Bannerman's “Murder in Marseilles.” It's a tale of kidnapping and slavery, or as the author constantly puts it, “white slavery.” This is a term you run into often mid-century and pulp literature, and of course the idea is that enslaving white people must be specially pointed out, as it's presumed to be orders of magnitude more evil than just plain slavery. In this case, a “swarthy Algerian” is the villain, and a Marseillaise beauty is the target. Do we need to tell you this plot is foiled? Of course not.
Adam offers another interesting feature—a piece of factual journalism entitled “Wild Girls of the American Suburbs.” It's about apartment complexes for singles, which are described as if they're twenty-four hour sex parties. All of this being well before our time, we weren't sure if such places actually existed, but it seems they did, in locales all over the U.S., particularly San Francisco, the Jersey Shore, Myrtle Beach, and Fire Island. Apparently Los Angeles had a famous one called Villa Dionysus, which we can't help noticing would be initialed V.D. Hopefully a walk-in-clinic was somewhere in the same zip code. Twenty-seven scans below.                           
 When Mafia thugs take on Oklahoma roughnecks it's an oil or nothing battle to the death.  
We finally picked up a new scanner and life is good again. You may have noticed the difference in recent uploads. No moire patterns. No weird rainbows. All clean. You may also have noticed the website looks a bit different. We were making some changes over the holidays and got caught in the middle, but we'll finish everything as soon as we can and get it all working properly again. We know, we know. We're really slow with this stuff. But we'll get there. Meanwhile, today we have for your enjoyment an issue of Australia's Adam magazine, published this month in 1972 with a cover illustrating Martin Rudyard's tale “The Mafia Oil Stakes,” about an organized crime cartel trying to take over a group of Oklahoma oil fields. Most of the owners sell out, but one stubborn cuss refuses, and sabotage followed by violence soon results. The climactic fight takes place against the backdrop of an oil well conflagration. A femme fatale is at the root of all this craziness, and her name is Angela Fierce. Sometimes writers try a little too hard, don't they? The inside cover star, just above, is Lois Mitchell, someone we've been meaning to feature. She was a popular glamour model during the ’70s, and appeared in copious amounts of high quality images shot by men's magazine contributors Ron Vogel, Edmund Leja, and others. The photo appearing here is new to the internet as far as we can tell. We have thirty-some scans of today's Adam, forty-eight other issues inside the website, and about thirty more we plan on sharing down the line.                               
 When in doubt just shoot everybody. 
Above is a really nice cover for an issue of Australia's Adam magazine published this month in 1969. The art illustrates John Dean's story “Aces High,” which is about an undercover operative trying to take down an organized crime kingpin. His way in is a Casino Royale style high stakes poker game, where he's surprised to find that his girlfriend is the arm candy of the kingpin. In the final shootout the girlfriend helps the agent take out the crooks, and we and the boyfriend learn that she's also an agent working undercover—deep undercover—to set up the crooks for the police. We've read better. We've read worse. We'll give Dean credit for deftly working the titillation angle of the girlfriend repeatedly bedding the kingpin so that he would thrust fully in her—er, we mean trust fully in her. Normally when we share an Adam we make thirty or forty scans. This one, however, came to us in something close to unread condition. Not a crease to be found anywhere. Because scanning involves flattening a magazine, which naturally brings about creases, we decided not to reduce this one's value. That means we have only the cover and few interior images for you. Sorry about that. And our scanner is a little balky of late too. It's six years old, so it's probably a case of that engineered obsolescence thing electronics companies do but which we're supposed to believe they don't. Sure. Anyway, we have dozens of other copiously scanned issues of Adam elsewhere in the website. Try a few of our favorites, here, here, and here, while we pick up a new scanner.       
 Wild time leaves man with splitting headache. 
The cover of this September 1970 issue of Australia's Adam magazine illustrates W. A. Harbinson's story “The Swinging Hep-Cat,” in which a man and woman spend most of their brief marriage fighting. He eventually strangles her. Or thinks he does. She actually survives and he only learns of this fact in jail from the cops who arrested him, as they laugh about it and reveal that she's fled for Paris—and the arms of another man. Much of the fiction in men's adventure magazines is disposable, for lack of a kinder term. We love it, of course. Men's magazine fiction would be nothing without hack writing. But Harbinson actually shows some skills in “The Swinging Hep-Cat,” as well as a muscular style. A sample:
We fought considerably during those early days of our marriage, bouts of most regal proportions, plates, knives, hair-brushes and antiques flying across the bedroom on fierce winds of abuse, she raging naked against the French windows in full view of the tourists below, me crouching back toward the door wondering how to tackle this bitch who had eaten my peace—a farce, a pantomime, a lunatic performance on both sides, always dissolving in the bed. Or this little description: Francisco Antonio D'Costa Pegado, a glorious dark beast of a man, rich as sin, tight as a drum, an incredible neurotic lover.
We checked after finishing the story, fully expecting Harbinson to have an extensive bibliography and we were right. He's written several dozen novels, mostly sci-fi, under his own name and that of Shaun Clarke. Not every good wordsmith manages to carve out a strong career—or any career, for that matter—so we were pleased Harbinson did well, because he actually knows how to use language in a way that brings it to three-dimensional life. At least he did in “The Swinging Hep-Cat.” He's still around and was last published in 2012, but we'll probably mine his earlier material, his stuff from the 1970s. We have high hopes. Elsewhere in Adam is fiction from Jack Ritchie, Austrian actress Senta Berger on the table-of-contents page, and plenty of cartoons. We have twenty-eight scans below, including a mega Berger in the final panel for your enjoyment.                           
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
2003—Suzy Parker Dies
American model and actress Suzy Parker, who appeared the films Funny Face and Kiss Them for Me, was the first model to earn more than $100,000 a year, and who was a favorite target of the mid-century tabloids, dies at home in Montecito, California, surrounded by family friends, after electing to discontinue dialysis treatments. 1920—Negro National Baseball League Debuts
The first game of Negro National League baseball is played in Indianapolis, Indiana. The league, one of several that would be formed, was composed of The Chicago American Giants, The Detroit Stars, The Kansas City Monarchs, The Indianapolis ABCs, The St. Louis Giants, The Cuban Stars, The Dayton Marcos, and The Chicago Giants. 1955—Williams Wins Pulitzer
American playwright Tennessee Williams wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his controversial play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which tells the story of a southern family in crisis, explicitly deals with alcoholism, and contains a veiled subtext concerning homosexuality in southern society. In 1958 the play becomes a motion picture starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. 1945—Germany Announces Hitler's Death
German radio in Hamburg announces that Adolf Hitler was killed in Berlin, stating specifically that he had fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany. But in truth Hitler had committed suicide along with his mistress Eva Braun, and both bodies were immediately thereafter burned. 1960—Powers Is Shot Down over U.S.S.R.
Francis Gary Powers, flying in a Lockheed U-2 spy plane, is shot down over the Soviet Union. The U.S. denies the plane's purpose and mission, but is later forced to admit its role as a covert surveillance aircraft when the Soviet government produces its remains and reveals Powers, who had survived the shoot down. The incident triggers a major diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
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