Intl. Notebook | Jun 29 2023 |
Above is the cover of a fun vintage nudie magazine called Mirage, made in London by an outfit known as Swanedge Publications. We like the name of the magazine. Glamour photography implies the ephemeral. You know what else is ephemeral here? Pubic hair. The muff-munching airbrush monster has struck again, removing the fuzzy bits and vaginal convolutions of a couple of models. Pubic regions as obscenity is something we talk about often here because we share a lot of Japanese nudes in which those areas are banned. The difference is that in Japan the models covered those parts in various clever ways so they still looked human. In the West underpaid guys in pre-press removed nether regions entirely and made the models sexless like Barbie dolls. We'll talk about this more later.
Vintage Pulp | Dec 10 2013 |
Above is the cover (and title page) of Rage magazine from December 1961 with uncredited artwork of a man receiving his just desserts. We chose this because the full magazine was featured a few years ago on the website Darwin Scans, and it just so happens that after a year-and-a-half absence the site is active again. That’s good news for vintage magazine lovers, because few sites make full scans available for download (though the link for this is dead). We’ve talked here about making our many rare magazines downloadable, but frankly the effort is just too much—scanning pages of ads and mastheads and personals would make it impossible to post (nearly) every day, which is where the joy lies for us. That’s why Darwin Scans is such an important site—the sheer work requires dedication, and few have it.