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.

In the summer of 1964, promoting her movie The Carpetbaggers, American actress Carroll Baker attended a premiere at London’s Plaza Theatre in Piccadilly Circus wearing a $28,000.00 transparent dress from designer Pierre Balmain. She had worn it before at the U.S. premiere in June, which means Londoners had an inkling what they were going to see, but what resulted was, well, a circus. The crowd went nuts and the situation devolved into what some newspapers described as a near riot. The above National Examiner, published today in 1972, features Baker wearing what we noticed was a similar but not identical dress. We got curious where it came from, and so we went looking.

Turns out in late 1964 designer Oleg Cassini, entranced by the Balmain dress, designed a similar version for Baker to wear at a promotional event in Las Vegas. The difference is in the placement of the beading—Balmain’s left a v-shaped peek-a-boo, whereas Cassini’s left a diagonal opening across the chest. You can see the difference below. Cassini had built his version of the dress in Baker’s absence using a model of identical size, but it didn’t really fit because bodies have all sorts of differences, even if their crude numerical aspects are ostensibly the same. Baker endured eighteen precarious hours in a gown that was so tightshe couldn’t shake hands without it shifting to reveal parts she wanted to keep hidden. She later wore the dress—hopefully altered—at a premiere of Cheyenne Autumn, and a photo of her posing with a dozen costumed Native Americans survives today in the Associated Press archives.

But the dress wasn’t finished quite yet. The next year immortal costumer Edith Head designed yet another variation on Balmain’s original for Baker to wear promoting the film Harlow. We don’t know where the previous two gowns went, but the Head version, one of several she put together, survived and has appeared in Hollywood fashion exhibitions as recently as 2003. Baker also wore a Balmain (or Cassini or Edith Head copy) during a 1966 troop tour in Vietnam, and the only reason a full firefight didn’t break out among the GIs the moment she unveiled herself is probably because that version had no cut-outs (right).

Here's the latest page from Goodtime Weekly with a shot from Don Ornitz of February 1958 Playboy centerfold Cheryl Kubert. Kubert is a bit of a mystery. Early Playboy centerfolds were pretty demure, and she showed less than normal. She had already appeared in magazines such as Pageant, Gala and Argosy, and after her Playboy appearance was featured in their 1959 calendar, but after that there’s only a bit appearance in the movie Pal Joey, and a bit part in 1980’s Smokey and the Judge. She died in 1989, supposedly from suicide. The calendar quips are below.

Jan 20: “Many a girl is only as strong as her weakest wink.”—Sam Cowling

Jan 21: “A girl is grown up when she stops counting on her fingers and starts counting on her legs.”—Irv Kupcinet

Jan 22: “A wizard is a man who can describe—without gesture—an accordion or a girl.”—Quin Ryan

Jan 23: “Fashion is what a her does to a hem to get a him.”—Joe Hamilton

Jan 24: “A clever girl is one who knows how to give a man her own way.”—Tom Poston

Jan 25: “The greatest mystery in the world is a woman who is a bachelor.”—Loretta Young

Jan 26: “A confirmed bachelor is a guy who’ll go to a drive-in on a motorcycle.”—Scott Brady

When it comes to vintage magazines, the range of prices is incredible. We’ve been seeing issues of Man’s Life online for $168.00. We will go out on a limb and say that nobody will ever pay that price. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we got this issue published January of 1959 for $4.00. The front is a bit mangled but the interior is fine, and includes some nice art, excellent fiction, and four pages on October 1954 Playboy centerfold Madeline Castle. The cover art for Thomas Halloran’s 1930s-era tale “Attacked by the Girl Pirates of the Yangtze” is by Will Hulsey, and the other spreads are by Geoffrey Biggs, Lou Marchetti, Bruce Minney, and Bruce Minnie (he does two and gets his name spelled two different ways). The Madeline Castle photo feature is uncredited. We’ll have more from Man’s Life a bit later.

The good folks at vintagegirliemags.com have posted the entirety of Adam vol. 1, issue 1, from 1956, with Lilly Christine on the cover and lots of interesting art, lit, and photography inside. Adam was one of many Playboy imitators, and one of the most fondly remembered. Since Lilly Christine was already quite famous by 1956, her appearance on the cover was a nice score for the fledgling imprint. She would appear at least one more time before her untimely death in 1965 at age forty-one. We’ve seen people try to sell this exact issue on Ebay for fifty bucks, so those with an interest in classic magazines should click over to vintagegirliemags and take advantage of this generous gift while the download link lasts. Some pages below. And if you’d like to see more of Lilly Christine, we uploaded some original scans a while back.

Above, a cover from the Aussie men’s mag Adam, April 1955, with art depicting a tense moment on the road in Lester Way’s short story “…the Dotted Line.” Below are some interior scans, including one containing the immortal Bettie Page, identified by the editors only as “this brunette”. But even if they didn’t name her, they certainly knew of her. By 1955 she was extremely famous. Her image had been used in dozens of magazines, including Playboy in January of that year, and she had appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show, in the burlesque films Striporama, Varietease, and Teaserama, and had acted in two off-Broadway plays. Page is in panels twelve and thirteen below, and you also get other pin-ups, some nice art, cartoons, and an interesting ad. 

Above, a great cover of Mammoth Western from March 1949 with art by Arnold Kohn illustrating Alexander Blade’s novelette “Prepare To Die, Amigo!” Kohn did quite a bit of work for Ziff-Davis Publishing, which in addition to the above imprint owned Mammoth Detective, Mammoth Adventure, and Mammoth Mystery. Kohn's work also appeared in Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Playboy, and many other magazines. See a few more of his covers here, and check him pin-up mode here. 

This March 1973 issue of The National Police Gazette sports an eye-catching color scheme cleverly copied from the dress of actress Raquel Welch, who you see at lower left. Welch discusses her early first marriage, which resulted in two children, and laments her restrictive personal/professional relationship with her manager/second husband, who shaped her into an internationally famous cinematic sexpot. As a basically shy person, Welch claims to feel trapped by her image, and says she’s reached the point where she’s fed up with it. Moving forward, she explains, she will be interested only in serious film roles, and will refuse any scripts focusing on her sexuality.

We always find it curious when actors try to make a sharp turn away from what made them famous in the first place. Both men and women do it—among men it’s often comedians and action stars, and among women it’s sex symbols. These career shifts fail far greater than nine times out of ten. In Welch’s case, she was quickly consigned to the purgatory of television movies. Later, she reversed course on whole sexuality thing and posed for Playboy, but scored roles only sporadically for the rest of her career.

But in our opinion, her failure to escape the sex symbol trap wasn't due to a lack of talent. It probably had simply to do with the fact that she had passed the dreaded thirty-year-old barrier and didn’t look like an ingénue anymore. Nowadays actresses last long past thirty, but tellingly, are still not allowed to look their age. Entire websites dedicated to bad cosmetic surgery testify to that fact. In Welch's case, her sudden relegation to second tier status just goes to show what poor taste Hollywood producers have. Because ingénue or not, Raquel is Raquel.

During our digging around at the Denver Book Fair we found one of the greatest calendars ever printed. This is not that calendar. So just imagine what we have in store. No, this is just a lil’ ole Varga calendar, published by Esquire magazine in 1946, and featuring twelve of Alberto Vargas’ classic pin-up paintings. In 1946 Vargas was doing quite well for himself, having established himself as one of the pre-eminent pin-up artists in the world. That success came to an abrupt halt that same year when Vargas lost a legal dispute with Esquire. It wasn’t until Playboy hired him in 1959 to paint a monthly Vargas Girl for the magazine that he regained a solid financial footing and reclaimed his throne as a top pin-up artist. Vargas died in 1982, but his work has continued to increase in value, with originals routinely auctioning for $10,000 or more. Actually, if you go online you even see sellers asking ten dollars for individual Vargas pages ripped from his old calendars. That strikes us as a bit extreme, but then we’re cheap, so what do we know? See the other Varga calendar we posted here.