Back during the summer, we posted a Malaysian pocket porn diary and mentioned that we had found three of them. Well, today seems like an appropriate day to share another of these gems. The last one was produced by the Syarikat Great Wall Advertising Co., whereas this one is the work of the Tan Liat Seng Tea Co. Which tells us that neither company is legit, and they were actually produced by a bunch of hosers working at some after hours printing press. Like Tijuana bibles, we suspect they were made and supplied in bulk, then sold under the counter at corner stores to various discerning customers. The previous one was all Asian, but this one, made two years earlier, has a mix of Western and Asian women, and we especially appreciate the creative use of cabbage for obscuring the last woman’s, er, patch. We’ll get around to posting the third one of these pretty soon. 

This rare promo shot of American actress Faye Dunaway was made when she was starring in Bonnie and Clyde, which was a film so polarizing that one of the most respected critics in America—the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther—launched a campaign against the values he felt the movie represented. But American filmgoers loved Bonnie and Clyde, and Crowther’s scathingly negative review exposed him as out of touch with the zeitgeist and especially with the maverick film directors coming out of Hollywood. It was 1967, and everything was changing. The Times fired Crowther and gave his job to Pauline Kael. Bonnie and Clyde became a worldwide hit and cinematic landmark. And Faye Dunaway became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. 

Last time we featured Inside Story, we took a detailed look at the contents, concluded that there was good reason it was a strictly blah tabloid, and decided not to buy it again. But that doesn’t mean we can’t cull them from online, so today we have this February 1957 cover that promises to expose “the amazing James Dean hoax.” Make sure you’re sitting down when you read this. The globe-spanning conspiracy Inside Story uncovered is simply that Dean’s posthumous spike in popularity wasn’t entirely due to sincere outpourings of appreciation by fans, but also because of a deliberate, behind-the-scenes publicity campaign by Warner Bros., who had produced his last movie Giant. Warners had decided that, after dropping $5 million on production, they needed a major publicity angle to have any hope of recouping their investment in a movie whose star had been dead a year and a month. The money quote: “Unfortunately, Dean, living again only for the profits of the movie-makers, will never see a dime of that increased gross…” Well, no, because death will tend to put a crimp in one’s personal finances. At least Inside Story published a nice photo, from East of Eden, below. We have two more issues, with lots of scans, and you can see those here and here. 

You may be asking yourself whether this book is really about what the cover seems to imply. Yes, Erle Stanley Gardner’s fictional attorney Perry Mason does indeed encounter a talking parrot that saw a murder. The Case of the Perjured Parrot was published in 1939, so we’re pretty sure Gardner was the first writer to conceive of such an outrageous plot device. He has plenty of fun with the idea, and his bird is full of surprises. Or birds, we should say, since there turns out to be more than one. In the end, Perry Mason learns that a parrot can be as difficult a witness as a human. Excellent cover art is by unknown.

The French erotic magazine Beauté may look familiar to you because we shared another copy of it a while back. That one was from 1937 and was called Beautés. This one, with a stylized twilight time photo-illustration, was published in 1933, when the Depression was in full swing. Perhaps that’s why the cover subject, who has a flapper/party-girl aspect, looks so weary and jaded. If her face rings a bell, that’s because she isn’t just any flapper—she’s Mary Astor, whose forty-four year screen career included turns in Dodsworth, The Maltese Falcon, The Hurricane, Across the Pacific, and The Great Lie. We have no idea why Beautés dropped the “s” from its name. Nothing was dropped from inside, though—it’s erotica as only the French were able to do it. Nine scans below, including a great shot of Muriel Evans, star of numerous films between 1928 and 1940. 

Above is a National Enquirer published today in 1965 with Italian actress and sex symbol Sophia Loren on the cover and her husband, film producer Carlo Ponti, in the upper left inset. Ponti claims he married the perfect female animal, which is interesting considering the marriage was not recognized in his home country. The problem was Ponti had married Giuliana Fiastri back in 1946, and divorce was illegal in Italy. Undeterred, he and Loren were married by proxy in Mexico in 1957 (i.e., two lawyers stood in for the couple, who were still back in Italy). When Pope John XXIII found out, he threatened Ponti and Loren with excommunication, eternal damnation, and so forth. This drama actually played out across the reigns of two Popes, because John XXIII exited from the scene via stomach cancer in 1963, giving way to Paul VI, who reiterated the whole excommunication/flaming pit/blood rain thing. In the end, Ponti and Loren became French citizens and—voilà—married in France. It was quite a lot of trouble to go through for a spouse, so you’d expect nothing less than for Ponti to call Loren a perfect female. But was she? Well, we only have visual evidence. See below and decide for yourself. 

Here you see Vaudeville, Hollywood, and Broadway actress Wynne Gibson, née Winifred Elaine Gibson, who dropped out of school at age sixteen to become a chorus girl, and appeared in the films If I Had a Million, Double Cross, Mystery Broadcast and fifty others between 1929 and 1956. This shot of her with a couple of dead mammals wrapped around her arms dates from 1934. 

The problem with utterly tasteless tabloid covers is that they lock us into utterly tasteless attempts to make fun of them. We could refuse to be dragged to their level, true, but that would be boring. Anyway, behold The National Insider in all its muckraking glory, published today in 1965. This comes from the book of tabloid covers we scored online last year, which means that even though we’d love to tell you what this miracle cure for lesbianism is, we can’t because we don’t have those pages. Probably, though, there’s a standard twelve-step program, as in Alcoholics Anonymous, where, for example, step one is admitting that you’re powerless over alcohol. So, just substitute the word lesbians. We’re powerless over lesbians. Hmm. Maybe it’s just us, but that doesn’t sound like a problem at all. 

You never want to go too long without a little National Informer in your life, so we’ve brought you another issue of our all-time favorite tabloid, this one published today in 1972. It’s an almost all-sex issue, with articles about fetishism, group sex, lesbian sex in prison, male contraceptive pills, hookers flying the friendly skies, and advanced stimulation methods to drive your partner wild. Mixed in there, in a place where you’d easily overlook it, is a great paste-up photo of Richard Nixon playing chess with Fidel Castro. Chess had something you could almost call mass appeal in the U.S. back in the 1970s, and Castro was a chess aficionado who once hosted a tournament in Havana that drew Mexican Grandmaster Filiberto Terrazas, American Grandmaster and world champ Bobby Fischer, and Soviet-Armenian Grandmaster Tigran Petrosian. So, in the context of the times, the Nixon/Castro composite isn’t as random as it seems. We’ve blown up the photo below, and included other pages of interest. 

What you see here, which we found on the great architecture forum Skyscraperpage.com, is a clipping from the Los Angeles Times showing the glare of an atomic bomb explosion. The shot was taken from atop the L.A. Times Building, and the light is from the 34 kiloton nuclear test codenamed Fox, which took place in the desert near Las Vegas, more than 300 miles away. Of course, the clipping has yellowed with time, but below you can see what the shot looked like originally. There were hundreds of photos of this type made during the heyday of U.S. atomic bomb testing, and with a glance around the web you can find many of them. This one happened today in 1951.