Above, French vintage of the best kind—scans from Paris Magazine #27, November 1933, with platinum-coiffed cover star Mary Carlisle, who was born in 1912, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and is still alive today. You also get photography from Schall, Zielke, Jean Moral, Studio Manassé, and art from Yves Brayer.

We managed to locate another issue of Paris Magazine today, this one from May 1935 with a bright-eyed photo-illustration of American movie star Jean Parker, née Lois Greene, on the cover. Inside, you get art by Julien Tavernier, and photographs of yesteryear’s showgirls, models and society women by Braig, Albin, and others. In the last two panels you get possibly the last photographs ever taken of the German actress and singer Edith Mera, who had died a few months earlier at age thirty of septicemia (a blood infection) caused by poor treatment of an abscess in her mouth. It’s a bittersweet footnote, but then when you’re looking at magazines this old it’s always bittersweet because everyone you’re seeing at the height of beauty and youth is now dead. Or as Shakespeare so eloquently wrote: Golden lads and all girls must, as chimney-sweepers come to dust. Now there’s a cheery thought for Friday! But hopefully it inspires you to really enjoy this spring weekend—you only get so many. Anyway, bittersweet or not, we love Paris Magazine and recently acquired about a dozen, so you’ll be seeing more soon. Check out our other issue, with its excellent Man Ray art here. 

Above is the cover and several interior pages from Paris Magazine, an erotic and art publication from France. This one was published in January 1935 and features the work of the legendary photographer Man Ray in panels three, four and five. Man Ray spent most of his adult life in Paris, specifically the Montparnasse district where he had a home, but he was actually American, born Emmanuel Radnitzky in the U.S. in 1890. He moved overseas when he was thirty-one, relocated to L.A. when World War II broke out, but returned to Paris in 1951 and lived there until his death in 1976.