Keep your hands up. Good. Back up. Very good. Your life depends on this next part. I wanna see you shake that ass. To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, “In this world there are two kinds of people—those with loaded guns, and those who dance.” Or something like that. The guy on the cover of this issue of Adam from June 1958 better work it like he's at the club if he hopes to survive. We can't believe how long it's been since we shared an issue of this magazine. It's been since November. At this rate we'll never get the rest uploaded. Well, today is a step in the right direction, although this issue was so brittle we couldn't scan it extensively without risking its destruction. For other magazines we consider that a sacrifice for the greater good of digital proliferation, but not with Adam. We never let Adam get harmed. Which is more than Eve could say. This is a different era of Adam than we usually post, one that predates the nudity and more freewheeling fictional content of the ’70s, but it's still quite nice. Inside are plenty of models, including Italian actress Marisa Allasio, wearing the same handkerchief bikini as in these photos we shared a while back. There's also a feature on beauty in sports, and a fun tale about looking for gold in South America. Speaking of looking for gold in foreign countries, we've got our hooks into the motherlode of Adam magazines. We have more than twenty on the way. That'll up our stash to forty-plus issues, assuming they don't vanish into the magazine vortex that seems to hover between here and Australia. Send good vibes. But no matter what, we'll have another issue soon.
Marisa Allasio’s bikini created unforeseen fallout—of the judicial kind.
Here’s a new tabloid in our collection—Pic, which like Whisper and a few other publications evolved from a pin-up magazine into a scandal sheet during the 1950s. The cover star on this November 1958 issue is Marisa Allasio, and the photo is one that originally appeared in the Italian magazine Il Borghesi and landed the publishers in court on obscenity charges. As anyone who has ever been to a beach can attest, there is a big difference between almost falling out of a bikini and actually doing it, and that difference is where all the fun lies. But the shot was nonetheless deemed too sexual by Italy’s moral watchdogs, and all the newsstand copies of Il Borghese were confiscated. In the end, the magazine was able to prove that the image was a promo still from Allasio’s forgettable 1956 film Poveri ma belli, aka Poor but Beautiful. Since Il Borgese was not responsible for the image, charges against the magazine were dropped. If you’d like to read a scathing contemporary review of the film, we found one by Bosley Crowther at the New York Times, and just because it’s Saturday, we have the almost-obscene bikini photo below, in its original unreversed state. We’ll have more from Pic later.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1951—The Rosenbergs Are Convicted of Espionage
Americans Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage as a result of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. While declassified documents seem to confirm Julius Rosenberg's role as a spy, Ethel Rosenberg's involvement is still a matter of dispute. Both Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953. 1910—First Seaplane Takes Flight
Frenchman Henri Fabre, who had studied airplane and propeller designs and had also patented a system of flotation devices, accomplishes the first take-off from water at Martinque, France, in a plane he called Le Canard, or "the duck." 1953—Jim Thorpe Dies
American athlete Jim Thorpe, who was one of the most prolific sportsmen ever and won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon, played American football at the collegiate and professional levels, and also played professional baseball and basketball, dies of a heart attack. 1958—Khrushchev Becomes Premier
Nikita Khrushchev becomes premier of the Soviet Union. During his time in power he is responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, and presides over the rise of the early Soviet space program, but his many policy failures lead to him being deposed in October 1964. After his removal he is pensioned off and lives quietly the rest of his life, eventually dying of heart disease in 1971.
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