Mid-century girly mags are always a winning draw.
As the Cole Porter song goes, in olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking—and exemplifying that concept is Ace, the “magazine for men of distinction,” which debuted in 1957 during the height of the cheesecake era. In this day and age Ace is strictly kid stuff. But that's why it's cool to look back at. Like other publications of its ilk, Ace came along to fill the void left by the slow demise of mens adventure magazines, and as was typical, it grew more daring as the years went by, before finally folding in 1982, itself a victim of changing tastes and more rawness provided by porn mags.
This particular issue, published this month in 1960, features the usual mix of humor, adventure, and models, including the amusingly named Beverly Hills, aka Carla Henderson, who gets a spread inside plus the eye-catching rear cover, Eve Post, who the editors claim was discovered by Jack Benny, and Brandy Kayse, who poses as "Eve." Several of the models, such as Frances Beck, Lacey Kelly, Virginia Remo, and Pat Gregory, managed minor film roles. Elsewhere in the magazine there's plenty of nice art, plus the usual "fact" (men are polygamous?) and fiction. Multiple scans below.
I see a tiny island! If we make it there we can recite captions from classic castaway cartoons until we're rescued! We have another issue of Adam today, with a fun cover illustrating Ron Rawcliffe's story, “The Nine Strippers.” Obviously, with a title like that we had to read it, and it deals with a charter boat captain hired to take nine exotic entertainers upriver into the wilderness under mysterious circumstances, and it turns out they've been hired by an organized crime cabal. When the gathering is raided by federal police the captain must escape intact with bullets flying, strippers fleeing, and mafiosi trying to hijack his boat. Also in this issue of Adam you get fiction by Leonard Calhoun and John P. Gilders, plus a bit of boxing and a lot of models, including German born Israeli actress Helena Ronée just below, and French actress Catherine Rouvel in the feature "She Wins Them All." And circling back to the cover and its two potential castaways, look forward to this: we have another set of castaway cartoons coming up.
To the inexperienced eye she looks unarmed, but her moral outrage and certainty that men are always wrong will prevail.
This cover of Adam magazine dates from July 1969, and as always there's conflict depicted. The art illustrates Ted Schurmann's story, “Deadly Efficient,” which is about a disgruntled secretary who helps rob her employer. What's she disgruntled about? Well, it's a story from a 1969 men's magazine, so what do you think the problem would be? That's right—her boss doesn't love her. But the very hour after the robbery, the boss calls up the secretary (not knowing yet that his office has been ransacked) and admits he has feelings for her, which leaves her to try to undo the theft before it's discovered. That effort backfires in the expected ways, leaving the corpse of her accomplice and a lot of questions behind. It's a decent story, so we weren't surprised Schurmann also published a couple of novels. But it looks as if Adam may have given him his first shot. Its role as a platform for new writers is yet another reason it was one of the best men's magazine around. We have twenty-five scans below, including a shot of British model/actress Eve Eden in panel twelve.
Interesting, full of stories, and very well read. As much as we love K.G. Murray Publishing's men's magazine Adam, especially during its early 1970s period, we have to admit that the succinctly titled Man is probably the prettiest magazine ever produced by the Aussie company. Today's issue from this month in 1964 is an example. The colors explode from the pages. The art, some of which is by Jack Waugh and the single-monikered Humph, is detailed and lovingly rendered. The format is large (so much so that we had to scan every page you see here in two parts and assemble them in GIMP). And the stories are pure male wish fulfillment.
The magazine was such a popular offering that K.G. Murray even published a pocket edition, which we've already shown you. In today's full-sized edition, as always you get several beautiful models, including one supposedly named Van Leman posing on a sea turtle like it's a coin-operated ride outside a Kwik-E-Mart. We imagine the turtle wasn't happy about it, but how can you tell? It's a turtle. They never look happy. Man also provides a few celebrity shots, including of British actress Gloria Paul, and Danish flash-in-the pan Heidi Hansen. All that and more in many scans down under.
The story's on the verge of ending badly for all of them.
The above issue of Adam once again features two men about to fall to their deaths while fighting. The magazine used this idea often, including on our last example. The art, which is probably by Jack Waugh, illustrates Eric. J. Drysdale's tale, “Ransom Double-Cross,” about a rich man whose wife is kidnapped for $200,000 ransom. He later learns that she's in on the scheme and wants to have him murdered so she can inherit everything. But you can't keep a good man down. His wife goes over a cliff, as do her two accomplices. The inside front cover of this issue is graced by Italian actress and occasional space femme Ornella Muti, while the rear cover model, just above, is familiar, but unidentified for now. We'll have more from Adam later.
Obscure men's magazine roars but has no bite
Tiger was a Chicago based men's magazine launched in 1956 by George Fox, Jr. that had as its premise the dubious idea that great men are tigers. It had features on “tigers of the past,” and “modern tigers,” and we suppose this was Fox's attempt at clever branding. Sounds a bit forced, right? It didn't seem to work for the public, because though Wikipedia claims that the publication lasted into the mid-sixties, we found no evidence anywhere that it lived past 1957. But we'll keep an eye out and see if we're wrong about that.
In the meantime, above you see the front of an issue that hit newsstands this month in 1957, and the cover star is famed nudist and model Diane Webber, aka Marguerite Empey, who we've seen a whole lot of around here. She's also featured in four pages at the back of the issue, and along with her are photos of Zahra Norbo, Gunnar Gustafson, obscure actress Melinda Markey, an unknown model lensed by Russ Meyer, and shots of Nona Van Tosh by Earl Leaf.
In the writing department, Fox swapped out his editor/publisher hat for a journalist's fedora and contributed a profile on George S. Patton, one of those so-called tigers of the past. If Tiger was anything like the magazine we once ran, Fox probably wrote the story in a panic to fill space after one of his writers torched a deadline. His writing is fine, but overall the magazine doesn't have any spark, literarily, artistically, or pictorially. We hate to say it, but it's a pretty tame tiger. But it's worth a look just because of Webber's presence. You'll find thirty-some scans below.
I'm an excellent deal. Plus there aren't even 10,000 men on my odometer yet.
Above: the uncredited front cover, plus the rear cover, of the very first issue of Ecstasy Novel Magazine, November 1949, with Trudy Hamilton's A Body To Own inside. We added the rear just to show how digest novels self-promoted their output. Readers typically bought their first in a bus station or drugstore, but thereafter were prodded to buy by mail, discreetly, to get their rocks off. Not that these novels were in any way pornographic. But they did get racy at times, depicting women who definitely weren't waiting for marriage before hitting the sheets. Often, the heroines even bedded two or three men. There was hardcore literary porn around, but it was harder to find and as a rule terribly written. Digest publishers employed competent authors, though they would never be mistaken for masters of the craft. Some, though, such as Jed Anthony, N.R. De Mexico, and Val Munroe, wrote good books. We have plenty of digests sitting around, so you'll continue encountering them on our site. You can see a couple more examples from Ecstasy Novel Magazine here, here, and here.
Some men go head over heels for a woman.
We have another of issue of Adam magazine for you to feast your eyes upon. This one was published in January 1973, and the cover illustrates the story, “Death Rail,” in which author Jack Ritchie asks the eternal philosophical question, “What do men think about when they are falling?” The answer is probably: how to land on the other guy. And what does a woman think about? In the story she congratulates herself for having inherited everything that belongs to her falling husband, and all just by making him erroneously believe she was screwing his business partner, and luring the two into a balcony fight. And the twist, unrevealed until the last sentence, is that it was all a misdirection play. She actually had been cheating, but with the chauffeur, not the business partner. Pretty good work from Ritchie, and another excellent effort from Adam.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1931—Nevada Approves Gambling
In the U.S., the state of Nevada passes a resolution allowing for legalized gambling. Unregulated gambling had been commonplace in the early Nevada mining towns, but was outlawed in 1909 as part of a nationwide anti-gaming crusade. The leading proponents of re-legalization expected that gambling would be a short term fix until the state's economic base widened to include less cyclical industries. However, gaming proved over time to be one of the least cyclical industries ever conceived. 1941—Tuskegee Airmen Take Flight
During World War II, the 99th Pursuit Squadron, aka the Tuskegee Airmen, is activated. The group is the first all-black unit of the Army Air Corp, and serves with distinction in Africa, Italy, Germany and other areas. In March 2007 the surviving airmen and the widows of those who had died received Congressional Gold Medals for their service. 1906—First Airplane Flight in Europe
Romanian designer Traian Vuia flies twelve meters outside Paris in a self-propelled airplane, taking off without the aid of tractors or cables, and thus becomes the first person to fly a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Because his craft was not a glider, and did not need to be pulled, catapulted or otherwise assisted, it is considered by some historians to be the first true airplane. 1965—Leonov Walks in Space
Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov leaves his spacecraft the Voskhod 2 for twelve minutes. At the end of that time Leonov's spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point where he could not re-enter Voskhod's airlock. He opened a valve to allow some of the suit's pressure to bleed off, was barely able to get back inside the capsule, and in so doing became the first person to complete a spacewalk. 1966—Missing Nuke Found
Off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, the deep submergence vehicle Alvin locates a missing American hydrogen bomb. The 1.45-megaton nuke had been lost by the U.S. Air Force during a midair accident over Palomares, Spain. It was found resting in nearly three-thousand feet of water and was raised intact on 7 April.
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