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. 

Today on Britain’s respected Guardian webpage, writer Mariella Frostrup muses about the prevalence of pornography in modern society and asks whether it’s harmful. At Pulp Intl., with few exceptions, our nude images are merely quaint, which raises the questions of whether they were ever considered harmful, and if so, why and when they came to be seen as artful. We are well aware that the airbrushing away of womens’ genitalia—something that was general practice at the time these images appeared—was seen by many rights advocates as a type of violence against women. After all, what was so dirty about female genitalia? Didn’t their erasure peel back the mask from a male-dominated society’s desperate efforts to control female sexuality?

Then along came Playboy, which challenged archaic laws designed to prevent mass production and mass mailing of pornography. Compared to what you see here today, Playboy represented a quantum leap. Its women looked less like Renaissance paintings and more like real human beings. By increments it beat back legal challenges, and eventually Penthouse, Playboy, and other newsstand magazines began to show pubichair, and then actual sex organs. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner was hailed as a First Amendment hero as well as a defender of womens' right to control their own sexuality. But pretty soon it was clear that women had won only the right to sell their sexuality—the control remained exclusively male.

Mariella Frostrup’s Guardian piece is like others written before. It suggests, like all those articles from earlier decades, that there’s a bright white line in erotica that has been crossed and that society is suffering for it. We can’t comment on the harm aspect, but we do see a line. Basically, old porn, because of its paper format, depended upon the labor of dozens of outside people—printers, film developers, pre-press personnel, postal workers, newsstand owners—and required such an investment of capital that 95% of its producers served the middle ground of taste and depicted acts that, with perhaps the added twist of one or two extra participants, were taking place in private anyway.

The internet changed all that. So if there’s a bright line, it lies where the internet atomized porn and turned much of it into a performance art, a sideshow that somehow has taken over center stage with acts that are most certainly not already occurring in private. Call us crazy, but even though these images were produced before we were born weprefer them to the new stuff. They don’t depict merely bodies or an act, but an entire lifestyle of beaches and gardens and all the warm thoughts and simple desires such places entail. This issue of Folies de Paris et de Hollywood appeared today in 1966. If it was ever offensive or harmful it isn’t anymore, so enjoy it as an artifact of an earlier age—not a better one by any means, but certainly a more artful one.

“Love in France isn’t what it used to be,” says French singer, dancer, and actress Leslie Caron. At least if National Enquirer is to be believed. This cover featuring an enchanting photo of Caron in a pixieish mode she made famous appeared today in 1960 when she was finishing work near Paris on the Napoleonic drama Austerlitz. At the time, she was having difficulties with her husband, actor Peter Hall. Caron wrote about the period in her autobiography Thank Heaven: “Temptations to have affairs were sometimes avoided, sometimes not.” In that context, this cover takes on added meaning. Would her husband have seen her words as reassuring or upsetting? In the end it didn’t matter. Filming 1961’s Fanny in Marseilles, Caron had an affair with cinematographer Jack Cardiff. So while love in France might not have been what it used to be, it was still good enough, seemingly. Caron’s subsequent whirlwind affair with Warren Beatty triggered a separation, and by 1965 she and Peter Hall divorced. 

This beautiful poster for Vicente Minelli’s 1952 drama The Bad and the Beautiful was made for the film’s French release as Les ensorceles. A behind-the-scenes look at the rise of a legendary Hollywood producer, the story is told in triptych, with each section focused on someone the producer betrayed during his rise to the top. The three sections are wrapped in a framing device wherein the betrayed have been called together to hear the producer’s pitch for working together again. Of course, all of them are too angry to consider such a collaboration—at least at first.

Though it doesn’t fit strictly into the idea of pulp, we picked up this issue of Paris Match published this month in 1949 because we liked the colorful cover. Actually, that’s not true. We picked it up because one of the Pulp girlfriends saw it and said, “Oooh, ballet!” This was in Bayonne, France back in September. When we knew we’d be in the vicinity one of the Pulp boys (BB) said “Oooh, duck hearts!” So there’s your Mars/Venus moment for today: we popped by Bayonne craving sautéed duck hearts as only the French can make, and got Paris Match for two euros. The cover star is French ballerina Yvette Chauviré, who was born in 1917, rose to become the lead dancer of l'Opéra de Paris, and later ascended to its directorship. Inside you get more photos of her, plus shots of American boxer Robert Charron, and shots of his wife (referred to only as Mme. Charron) in a ringside seat watching her husband fight. Take note guys—this is what your girlfriend/wife looks like when you’re getting the living shit kicked out of you. Also inside are photos of actress Cécile Aubry and conservative politician Paul Reynaud. All for you. Enjoy.

You see this cover for 1958’s Jack Spot—The Man of a Thousand Cuts around the internet quite a bit, especially on auction sites, because Hank Janson, aka Stephen D. Frances, is a very popular vintage author. But you don’t often see the back cover. Since we were talking about a spread-legged/phallic symbol motif yesterday, we thought we’d show you another example. The excellent art, which we found at a very interesting website here, is uncredited, so it seems. As far as content, the book is a biography of a notorious London gangster named Jack Comer, née Jacob Camacho, who as a youth became known as Jack Spot due to a mole on his cheek. Spot was quite a troublemaker, and used his knife-fighting skills and aptitude for vice to build and maintain a criminal empire that stretched from London to Tangier. Probably he deserves a heavier treatment on this website at some point, but we’ll see about that later. However, we can pretty much guarantee we’ll get back to Hank Janson, because he wrote numerous novels, and also created a character named Hank Janson who starred in some of the books, and, just for good measure, later stepped aside and let the pseudonym Hank Janson be inhabited by several other authors. Pretty convoluted, but it’s just the type of thing we love here.