We hope you didn’t think we were being rough on Michel Gourdon yesterday. We certainly don’t qualify as art experts. We were just saying maybe he missed the mark on that particular book cover. He did fine on hundreds of others. Today, we have an example of his work at its best. Inside this May 1959 issue of La Vie Parisienne Gourdon not only offers up a top-notch illustration, but accompanies it with a poem he authored entitled “Jalousie,” or Jealousy. It’s an interesting theme for a painter of pin-ups to tackle, but since we are no more poetry experts than we are art experts, we won’t pretend to critique the merits of the verse. You want to know how it goes? E-mail us and we’ll send it to you. Also in this issue you get art from fellow illustrators Jacques Leclerc, R. Caron, and E. Klein. In addition, this is another chopped up magazine with loose clippings from another issue, we believe from June 1959. We’ve included a few of those pages as well.
1966—LSD Declared Illegal in U.S.
LSD, which was originally synthesized by a Swiss doctor and was later secretly used by the CIA on military personnel, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and members of the general public in a project code named MKULTRA, is designated a controlled substance in the United States.