This cover for Maurice Leblanc’s thriller La Agencia Barnett & Cia was printed in Argentina by Editorial Tor as entry #87 in their serie amarilla, or yellow series. Leblanc was a well known writer whose most famous creation was the thief and detective Arsène Lupin, a sort of French version of Sherlock Holmes. When La Agencia Barnett & Cia was originally published in France in 1941 it was called L’Agence Barnett & Cie, with both “Cia” and “Cie” meaning “Co.” The cover is signed but we can’t really read it. Is it Tenser? Teneer? Tenger? We get no hits on any of those names, which is too bad. But the art is brilliant and we have a feeling this particular illustrator will pop up again, hopefully with a more legible signature. 

Here’s an interesting little item we found on an auction site. It’s a copy of the Argentine film magazine Mundo Argentino with Lauren Bacall, née Betty Joan Perske on the cover. The inset text reads, “Lauren Bacall says goodbye forever to Hollywood,” and while she did disappear from films for four years, she returned in 1963 and has continued acting all the way up until 2012 so far. This cover appeared today in 1959. 

This February 1966 National Police Gazette marks the eighteenth time we’ve found Hitler on the venerable publication’s cover, and this is not the last we’ll see of Der Führer on the Gazette—we have three more that will bring his total to twenty-one, and we’re sure there are others out there. This time around, the world’s greatest medium Madame Luce Vidi has seen Hitler not crisped to a cinder in Berlin, but alive and kicking in the tropics. The Gazette attempts to quell any doubts about Vidi's divinatory prowess by informing readers that she foresaw “the assassination of President Kennedy and had predicted the time of the tragedy, and had also seen the death of French boxer Marcel Cerdan, the former middleweight champion, in a plane crash.”

After establishing Vidi’s bona fides, Gazette editors tell us their independent research showed that Hitler escaped Germany aboard a submarine on April 10, 1945, and traveled to a base in Norway where he and a female companion boarded a second sub, laden with millions of dollars in treasure, and sailed for Argentina. Hitler eventually fetched up in the vicinity of San Carlos de Bariloche, where Nazis had years earlier purchased 10,000 acres of land. Vidi describes what Hitler looks like in 1966 (hint: not good—see below). The story ends by claiming he resides in a tropical fortress, where “the aged despot, his heart brimming with hatred and his mind full of the days when his voice shook the world, lives out his time in misery.”

As we’ve pointed out, anyone who thinks conspiracy theories are a new phenomenon needs to read more history. Americans in particular have always given credence to alternate versions of important events, so next time you see someone on television saying Barack Obama was born in Kenya, just remember it’s nothing new. As it turns out though, the town of San Carlos de Bariloche was exposed as a hideout for at least one Nazi when former SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke was found there in 1995. He had been running the local German school. As recently as 2004 claims that Hitler had also lived in the area were aired in an internationally published book, and of course slammed by mainstream historians. But since something like 9,000 former Nazis fled to various parts of South America, we'd be lying if we said we didn't wonder if Hitler couldn't have managed the feat.

Though Luce Vidi supposedly utilized a crystal ball for her Hitler visions, her true specialty was reading ink blots—i.e., she required her clients to throw ink on a surface and she would divine the future from the resultant shapes. We can’t help wondering if she ever divined that she would go from being the “world’s greatest medium” to almost completely forgotten. We doubt it. They never seem  to see that coming. Weshould also note that her vision did not jibe with the beliefs of those who theorized Hitler living near San Carlos de Bariloche. Vidi saw Hitler living in a tropical place—in the background was a turtle dozing on a sandy beach. San Carlos de Bariloche is nestled in the foothills of the Andes, an area where people go to ski, trek and climb. There isn’t a beach anywhere in sight. 

Above is a cover of National Star Chronicle which appeared this month in 1964 with a story about a twenty-year-old Argentine woman named Margarita Andrade, who we’re told was kidnapped and forced to take part in an orgy. “I was compelled to perform sexual acts that I had never heard of before,” she says. “I’m too ashamed to describe what I had to do—and what was done to me.” And then she goes on to describe it. Short version—she was stripped and shoved into a room filled with naked men and women engaged in unnatural sex acts. Which raises the question—if they had enough consenting perverts to fill a room why did they need someone who would scream, scratch, and kick various fat dudes in the nuts? And considering the severity of the crimes, why did they later take her "to a deserted spot near the town of Monte Grande and shove her out of the car," thus allowing her to be a witness and make it onto the cover of national newspapers? Mystifying, no? But this story may not be a complete fabrication. National Star Chronicle was mostly fiction, but it was often mixed with a speck of truth, kind of like here. So in the end we'll never know. That's the trick of tabloid journalism—just when you think you can write it off, they throw something (semi) real at you.

The Argentine celeb magazine Radiolandia was launched in 1927 by publisher Julio Korn just seven years after Argentina’s first radio station, Radio Argentina, began broadcasting in Buenos Aires. Radiolandia quickly evolved to include coverage of the growing medium of cinema, and grew to become one of the best selling magazines in Argentina, part of a Korn empire that included Antena, Goles, Vosotras, TV Guía and Anteojito. Besides printing 7 million copies of these magazines a month, Korn also was heavily involved in publishing sheet music, something he had begun doing in 1924. His involvement in this industry was fitting, considering his first job was selling tango sheets from a market stall at age fourteen.

By the 1940s Korn’s magazines dominated the Argentine weekly market, and made him one of the country’s most influential men. Later he produced films, beginning with 1955’s La quintrala. The issues of Radiolandia below were published between 1943 and 1957, with cover stars Iván Casadó, Zully Moreno, Ricardo Passano, Elina Colomer, Julia Sandoval, Delia Garces, Berta Singerman, and Luisa Vehil. The painted covers are by Vitucho, who we’re trying to dig up more info on. As for Korn, perhaps we’ll get back to him later. 

Yesterday, an Argentinian memorabilia dealer named Mikel Barsa attempted to auction what he says is an 8mm porn reel starring Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe. According to Barsa, who represents anonymous sellers that priced the film at $480,000 but got nothing when no bidders emerged, Monroe was broke at the time and had no choice but to parlay sex for money. This would have been presumably 1946 or 1947, when Monroe was indeed known to be broke and had indeed posed nude. However, spokespeople for Monroe’s estate have come forward and pronounced the porno a fraud. But they would say that, wouldn't they? So we got hold of a low-rez copy of the flick in order to assess it ourselves. In it the alleged Monroe strips, plays with a dildo, and engages in a little sixty-nine with a male partner before moving on to the main event. Afterward the pair have a smoke and a laugh. It doesn’t take a photographic expert to see that the woman involved doesn't resemble Monroe very closely. The hairline is wrong, the facial proportions are way out in left field, the breasts are not the ones that so thrilled Playboy readers when she appeared as the magazine's first centerfold, and there’s what looks like a hysterectomy scar we’re pretty sure Monroe didn’t have. We’ve posted some screen captures below so you can see for yourself how obvious this scam is. But don’t be too hard on Mr. Barsa and his associates. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again—in a culture that values money above all things, you can’t be surprised what people will do to get it.

We located a worn-out copy of Inside News from April 1964, and on the cover it promises assorted criminal atrocities and indeed delivers. But the piece that really caught our eye (because of some similarities to the current situation of Italy’s buffoon-in-chief Silvio Berlusconi) is the story on Argentine ex-president Juan Perón and his fourteen-year-old mistress Nelida Rivas. The relationship was not something Perón was trying hard to keep secret—he had met her in late 1952 and she soon became a frequent companion. The public was generally forgiving because Rivas was too young to know better and Perón was a widower, his wife Evita having died in mid-1952. Still, he was sometimes grilled by the press and often criticized by opponents. In the end, it was opposition from the Catholic Church that triggered his undoing. His scorn for what he saw as their meddling in his personal business caused him to take a series of political steps that helped justify his excommunication by Pope Pius XII. When this Inside News hit the stands, Perón was living in exile in Spain. To say that his relationship with Nelly Rivas cost him the presidency of Argentina—as Inside News does—is a stretch. But it is fair to say that Perón’s enemies were able to turn Rivas into a mighty handy weapon. Berlusconi take heed. 

Above, a cover of Cine-Mundial, published in Argentina in January 1942, with an illustration of Veronica Lake by Morr Kusnet. Lake was just twenty years old at the time, on the cusp of a big year that would see her star with Alan Ladd in two of her best films—This Gun for Hire and The Glass Key. 

Above, an issue of El Suplemento, an art deco-inspired fashion magazine published in Argentina during the 1930s. This issue, with a cover beautifully illustrated by Julio Orione, appeared today in 1931.