Vintage Pulp

September 16 2025

CASH AND DASH

First I'll let her wake up and see that I struck it rich. Then I'll tell her I'm divorcing her.

The above issue of Adam magazine was published this month in 1961, with a cover illustrating Arne Paule’s story “Dead on Time,” about a gangster who hires out the killing of his mistress, which of course doesn’t happen once the killer gets a look at the target. As usual there’s art signed by Jack Waugh inside, while another illustration—the one split into panels five and six—is signed by Yaroslav Horak. Sometimes known as Larry Horak, he was a Czech-Russian born in China who emigrated to Australia in childhood, began working for Adam‘s parent company K.G. Murray Publishing in 1957, and put together a career that made him one of the most prolific cartoonists in Australia.

Elsewhere in Adam the editors devote several pages to international boxing, and specifically the idea that referees need to be tough. We’ll agree with that—we’ve seen a couple get slugged in the face. The article gives numerous examples of problematic situations for refs, and mentions that in the U.S. the Ku Klux Klan had a part in fixing fights so white boxers would win. In addition, in panel eleven you saw a typical theme in mid-century cartoons—two men in a dungeon. We put together a collection of those a while back which you can see here. We still have issues of Adam coming in on occasion, so right now we have more than thirty to post. Look for more soon.

Australia, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, China, Russian, Adam Magazine, Jack Waugh, Yaroslav Horak, Larry Horak, Arne Paule, Ku Klux Klan, magazine art, literature, boxing

Vintage Pulp

August 30 2025

WHATEVER EXPLODES YOUR BOAT

Let's face it—once the wine tasting and the luau were over there was no reason to finish the cruise anyway.

Above is the cover of the August 1976 issue of the Australian men’s adventure magazine Adam, a publication we’ve featured a few times* in the past. The front illustration is an unusually colorful and evocative piece for a magazine that specialized in them. It pairs with a story by stalwart Adam contributor Mike Rader titled “The Eye of the Dragon,” which is about a magazine writer in Malaysia, the beautiful spy he encounters, and a legendary gem coveted by all and sundry. As always, Rader does pretty good work.

This issue of Adam is one in which erotica and pulp style literature coexist to nice effect, with beautiful interior illustrations by Jack Waugh and others interspersed with photos of cinema sex symbols Andrea Lau and Karin Schubert, a snippet on xxx star Marilyn Chambers, and semi-nude photos of unknown models. When people ask why we have vintage nude photos on our website this is exactly why—it’s relevant to what was produced by post-pulp publishers throughout the late ’60s and the entirety of the 1970s.

*This is the ninety-third issue we’ve shared. Click the keyword “Adam” below if you want to lose a substantial amount of your valuable time.

Australia, Adam Magazine, Mike Rader, Andrea Lau, Karin Schubert, Marilyn Chambers, Jack Waugh, magazine art, literature

Musiquarium, Vintage Pulp

June 22 2025

A FELINE BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE

Forget the whip! Scratch him behind the ears! I think cats really like that!

This issue of Adam magazine was published in June 1959 with nicely colorful art of a cat trainer stuck in a cage with an angry panther. Adam covers were always derived from one of the interior stories. This time it’s “Circus of Death,” credited to D. Mills, and it’s about a lion trainer, a panther trainer, and a high wire walker who all lust for the same woman. The panther trainer plots with the high wire walker to use a cat named Juju to kill the lion trainer. It’s a pretty good story despite the woman’s completely ornamental role—she doesn’t even have a line of dialogue. Also inside is “Pagoda Well” by Berkeley Mather, who wrote the ambitious if flawed 1960 Central Asian adventure The Pass Beyond Kashmir, which we talked about here. He runs over familiar ground, weaving the story of an arrogant character named Sefton who signs on to a diamond mining expedition to Burma only to find he’s taken on more than he can handle. Of special note in this issue is a feature on blues singers. You get rare photos of Bessie Smith, Lena Horne, and others. These older Adams have less photography and art than the awesome ’70s issues, but the covers are always beautiful. More from this publication to come.

Australia, Adam Magazine, Berkeley Mather, Bessie Smith, Eartha Kitt, Lena Horne, Jack Waugh, Hart Amos, Damon Mills, magazine art, literature

Vintage Pulp

June 13 2025

INTO THE MANOSPHERE

Women are invited too, but only for sex.

There’s a blurred line between men’s adventure magazines of the 1970s and what most people would call porn. Man’s World is a publication we looked at a while back and commented upon in terms of its move toward the latter. That issue was from February 1973. Today’s is from June 1972, and it too has amplified sexual content compared to a few years earlier. It offers articles about masturbating women, tested lovemaking techniques, a “sex swap newsletter,” and there’s nude photography. We suspect most people would agree that a porn magazine is one in which the models pose—at minimum—frontally nude. For Man’s World that shift had been completed by 1977. It was defunct two years later, unable to keep pace with more explicit and better budgeted competitors in a shifting marketplace. For now, though, its illustrations were still coming from veterans of the men’s adventure heyday—Earl Norem, Bob Larkin, and Mort Künstler, using the pseudonym Emmett Kaye. They always lent men’s adventure magazines artistic credibility, no matter how they evolved. Thirty scans below.

New Guinea, Man's World, Earl Norem, Bob Larkin, Mort Kunstler, Emmett Kaye, magazine art

Vintage Pulp

May 27 2025

HUNTER AND HUNTED

Two roads diverged in a wood, they took the one less traveled by, and really wished they'd taken the other.

Above: some scans from Adam magazine, published this month in 1965. The cover illustrates the tale, “Calamity’s Apprentice,” by Walter S. Bratu, who had a story in the previous issue we featured, as well as ones we posted last year, in 2018, and back in 2012. We looked him up expecting to find a lengthy bibliography, but apparently he published only with Kenmure Press—i.e. Adam and Man. Elsewhere inside this issue is art by Jack Waugh and Cal Cameron, more fiction, stories claimed to be true about cannibalism in New Guinea and Cold War spy Margarete Klosa, and a couple of beautiful models, as usual. We’ve now shared ninety-two issues of Adam, and a glance at the shelves suggests we have about thirty-five more. Yes, we’ve cornered the market on this particular Australian publication. Was doing so expensive? A bit. But it was worth it. More to come.

Australia, New Guinea, Adam Magazine, Jack Waugh, Cal Cameron, Walter S. Bratu, Margarete Klosa, magazine art, literature

Vintage Pulp

May 14 2025

POST CRYPT ERROR

Her first mistake was walking through the cemetery gates.

With its graveyard cover art in gangrenous colors you’d think this was a Halloween issue of Adam magazine, but of course, being from Australia, it wasn’t. It’s just general creepiness, from this month in 1970, with a cover illustrating the short story, “Golden Boy,” by Walter S. Bratu, in which the main character attempts to retrieve $25,000 from a crypt. Elsewhere inside is more fiction, a bit of fact, and a fair amount of flesh, including from Swedish model Barbara Klingered. Scottish actress Caroline Munro also puts in an appearance. We occasionally give a running tally of how many issues of Adam we’ve posted—this is number ninety-one. If you want to kill an enormous amount of time, click the keywords at bottom and enjoy Adam in full.

Australia, Adam Magazine, Walter S. Bratu, Barbara Klingered, Caroline Munro, magazine art, literature, nudity

Vintage Pulp

May 10 2025

POLAR EXPRESSION

Wow, I've never seen one do that before! Maybe the whites' uncontrolled carbon emissions are melting its pack ice!

Above: a Sidney Riesenberg cover for the pulp Top-Notch Magazine, January 1921. This publication, from Street & Smith in New York City, resided on newsstands from 1910 to 1937, managing more than six hundred issues. Jack London, Robert E. Howard, and L. Ron Hubbard had stories inside over the years.

Street & Smith, Top-Notch Magazine, Sidney Riesenberg, Jack London, Robert E. Howard, L. Ron Hubbard, magazine art, literature

Vintage Pulp

May 8 2025

WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT

I think it's that way. In any case, it's nice our wives aren't here to demand that we ask someone for directions.

This unusual May 1953 cover of Man To Man was painted by Mark Schneider, who we haven’t seen for a while. You may remember his extensive work for Sir magazine. Inside here you get plenty of value. Jonathan Craig offers a short story titled “Death of a Jazzman,” while John F. Hudgins offers “The Coward.” Both tales feature illustrations, once again, from Schneider. Onward, and readers get a deep look at Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, and his supposed correct predictions. There are pieces about baseball, and the world’s strongest woman Kati Sandwina, aka Kati Brumbach, from Alsace-Lorraine. There’s also an interesting article on child marriage by journo Edgar Price, and he contorts himself into a generally favorable position, which many modern politicians would appreciate. After that there’s a feature on the deaths of Lupe Velez and Carole Landis via sleeping pills, or “goof balls,” framed as a big problem in America. And as usual with men’s adventure magazines, you get models, in this case Margie Tenney and Vicki Stevens. All below, in nearly forty scans.

Man to Man, Lupe Velez, Carole Landis, Jonathan Craig, Margie Tenney, Vicki Stevens, Nostradamus, Michel de Nostredame, magazine art, literature, baseball, drugs

Vintage Pulp

March 29 2025

A DEATH AQUATIC

Trouble so deep she can't even fathom it.

Above: a cover of Australia’s constantly amazing Adam magazine published this month in 1963. The art illustrates Dennis Chinner’s tale, “Diving Doll, about an aquatic salvage worker who’s in love with his business partner’s wife, gets into an affair with her, and ponders the ease with which the inconvenient hubby could be murdered during a dive, but under the guise of an accident. In the end he decides not to do it. He’s no monster. Then the very accident he’d contemplated occurs, everyone assumes he’s a murderer—but one against whom there’s not enough proof to arrest and prosecute—and he finds that in the community’s eyes he’s become the very monster he’d feared being. Worse, the woman he loves thinks he’s a murderer too. Interestingly, of all the twists we’ve read in vintage crime fiction, we hadn’t run across this precise one before of a man forced to accept his terrible new status. It’s just another unsolvable dilemma in mid-century men’s magazine fiction. Twenty-one scans below.

Australia, Adam Magazine, Hart Amos, Young Corbett III, Mickey Walker, Jimmy Carruthers, Wally Taylor, Johnny Topp, Dennis Chinner, boxing, magazine art, literature

Vintage Pulp

March 6 2025

ATTENTION DEFICIT ORDER

Hand over the money or I'll cut your damned— Hey! Eyes off the woman and listen!

This cover of Adam magazine is from March 1972, and inside readers are treated to a nice photo of tabloid regular and occasional Adam model Lois Mitchell, sets from a few other models we can’t identify (though their names nearly always are given to us by readers eventually), art from Jack Waugh and others, and a dungeon cartoon that you can consider an addition this collection. The cover illustrates Edward D. Hoch’s tale, “The Spy and the Mermaid,” about a U.S. government agent named Jason Rand sent to Cairo to investigate the death of a fellow agent. It has a bit of a Cold War focus, but mainly it’s about Rand’s efforts to unmask the killer. The dead agent met his demise at the blade of a knife, and there are knives aplenty, including as part of the ceremonial kilt accoutrements of a Scottish agent named Kirkcaldy, the scuba gear of archaeologist Leila Gaad, and the personal protection tools of a local youth named Kharga. Mysteries in short fiction are usually not deeply layered, and this one isn’t either, but the tale itself is pretty good. We have thirty-plus scans below.

Australia, Egypt, Cairo, Adam Magazine, Lois Mitchell, Edward D. Hoch, Jack Waugh, magazine art, literature, nudity

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 17

1933—Blaine Act Passes

The Blaine Act, a congressional bill sponsored by Wisconsin senator John J. Blaine, is passed by the U.S. Senate and officially repeals the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution, aka the Volstead Act, aka Prohibition. The repeal is formally adopted as the 21st Amendment to the Constitution on December 5, 1933.

February 17

1947—Voice of America Begins Broadcasting into U.S.S.R.

The state radio channel known as Voice of America and controlled by the U.S. State Department, begins broadcasting into the Soviet Union in Russian with the intent of countering Soviet radio programming directed against American leaders and policies. The Soviet Union responds by initiating electronic jamming of VOA broadcasts.

February 16

1937—Carothers Patents Nylon

Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanideâ€”not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juiceâ€”resulting in his death in late 1937.

February 15

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

February 14

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.