 Man Junior rings in the new year Down Under style. 
We've shared a few issues of Australia's Man and Man Junior magazines. Like all men's publications they featured the combination of fact and fiction, sport and adventure, humor, and alluring women. And like many men's magazines, they published annuals—year-end or year-beginning collections of the best of the previous 365 days. That's what we have for you today—Man Junior's annual for 1965. It avoids any possibility of intellectual enrichment by focusing only on the primal—lust and laughs. Stripped down to nothing but glamour photos and cartoons, the magazine lays bare the fact that text is mere legitimization, a means of de-perving the visual content. Who'd buy an annual if it contained only dubious reporting and short stories? Not many people, we'd wager. These mags were all about the id. We have plenty of that below, with thirty scans. They comprise lovely women such as Betty Brosmer, Christine Aarons, and, in the final panel, June Wilkinson. The cartoons are beautifully colorful, if only occasionally successful as humor. We have more coming from Man and Man Junior in the future.                              
 Vintage glamour magazine produces treasure trove of rare celebrity photos. 
Above you see the cover of Jem magazine, founded by famed bodybuilder Joe Weider as one of the first high budget competitors to Playboy. He also launched the similar imprint Monsieur. The scans above and below are from the very first issue of Jem, published this month in 1956. It came out during the heyday of the era when magazines of this type gave equal billing to Hollywood celebrities and erotic stars (something we try to emulate on Pulp Intl.), which means you'll not only see rare photos of actresses like Anita Ekberg, Jayne Mansfield, and Kim Novak, but also burlesque dancer and model Candy Barr (on the cover and in the beautiful masthead page), model Betty Brosmer (who was Weider's wife), and dancer Lili St. Cyr. Jem also poached July 1956 Playboy centerfold Alice Denham, which must have served as a shot across Hefner's bow. In addition to all those attractions, you get illustrations by Dwight Howe, Ken Wyeth, John Martin, and Jack Lyons. The magazine is so vibrant we uploaded every page that had either photos or art, making for a whopping fifty panels to enjoy below. We found this on Archive.org, but we're going to see if we can locate a few in real life.                                                  
 Anything that other Betty does can do I can do better. 
Bettie Page wasn't the only mid-century celebrity who made uncredited appearances on book covers. This front for Allan Horn's The Teaser features Betty Brosmer, she of the extreme hourglass figure with its famed eighteen inch waist. This cover appeared at the height of her modeling career, and since Novel Books wasn't a major imprint, we wonder if they paid for her image. We doubt it. The narrative here deals with a young woman who marries a seventy-year-old millionaire, and this is not the first time Horn explored this idea. He used it as the premise for 1966's, The Beast in the Bedroom. He's suspected of being a pseudonym. If so he wrote for several companies—Midwood, Vega/Tropic, Private Editions, and Playtime. That's getting around. We'll keep on the alert for more info on Mr. Horn. Maybe we'll even read one of his books. We saw Whore from Maupin Street cheap, and who can resist a title like that?
 Actually, I cook the most fattening foods imaginable. I just wear a belt reinforced with high tensile steel. 
We don't have to tell you why American model Betty Brosmer became famous, right? She and her wasp waist were photographed for over three-hundred magazine covers, and she had to be hospitalized and resuscitated each time. Well, not really. Brosmer wore a corset for long periods, which eventually reshaped her waist to give her the hourglass that was popular during the 1950s. It was called “waist training,” which ranks as one of the funnier rebrandings of torture ever, right after “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It was thought to be harmless back then. Not so today, though many celebrities still do it. But assuming a woman did herself no harm, once she stopped wearing corsets her waist would return to its normal size in hours or days. The two photos here showing the eighteen-inch results of Brosmer's diligent training are from around 1955. 
 My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns hun. 
April 1955 issue of Tops, with cover star Betty Brosmer. We’d never heard of this lovely woman before, but we were struck by this image so we looked her up. Turns out she was famous for having the perfect figure, which in her case was 38-18-35. That doesn’t sound perfect to us, so much as structurally unsound, but it is attention-getting. You can see in the two asstastic shots below that her business class rivals anything Kim Kardashian has to offer. Brosmer went on to marry fitness guru Joe Weider, become a fitness guru herself, and co-found Shape magazine, which became a wild success partly by helping women to reduce the size of their asses. Fate is not without a sense of irony.
 
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison.
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