| Vintage Pulp | Nov 14 2021 |
Vintage glamour magazine produces treasure trove of rare celebrity photos.
Above you see the cover of Jem magazine, founded by famed bodybuilder Joe Weider as one of the first high budget competitors to Playboy. He also launched the similar imprint Monsieur. The scans above and below are from the very first issue of Jem, published this month in 1956. It came out during the heyday of the era when magazines of this type gave equal billing to Hollywood celebrities and erotic stars (something we try to emulate on Pulp Intl.), which means you'll not only see rare photos of actresses like Anita Ekberg, Jayne Mansfield, and Kim Novak, but also burlesque dancer and model Candy Barr (on the cover and in the beautiful masthead page), model Betty Brosmer (who was Weider's wife), and dancer Lili St. Cyr. Jem also poached July 1956 Playboy centerfold Alice Denham, which must have served as a shot across Hefner's bow. In addition to all those attractions, you get illustrations by Dwight Howe, Ken Wyeth, John Martin, and Jack Lyons. The magazine is so vibrant we uploaded every page that had either photos or art, making for a whopping fifty panels to enjoy below. We found this on Archive.org, but we're going to see if we can locate a few in real life.
Gem MagazinePlayboyCandy BarrBetty BrosmerAnita EkbergJayne MansfieldLili St. CyrGwen VerdonJoyce WinfieldEve MeyerAlice DenhamDwight HoweMonique Van VoorenJack LyonsKen WyethJohn MartinJoe Weider
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 14 2014 |
Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s superhunk!
Serving as something of a flipside to yesterday’s post, today we have some excellent examples of the beefcake art of George Quaintance. As we mentioned before, Quaintance’s work seems to be growing more popular all the time, and these examples were going for $150.00 and up. That makes us appreciate even more the Quaintance we got for five dollars during our U.S. trip in 2012. Your Physique was launched by bodybuilder Joe Weider when he was fourteen, which makes any plans we have for the future seem pretty unambitious by comparison. These issues date from 1946 and 1947, which were the only years Quaintance did covers for the magazine. Typically, he illustrated actual bodybuilders, and you can see their names on the covers. You may also notice an interesting juxtaposition of the Empire State Building in panel seven. Quaintance's love of the male form emanates quite strongly from these masterworks, not just because of their technical brilliance, but because of the dominant scenarios some of the figures are placed within—for example, flying above or striding across the planet. The top cover was in pretty bad shape, necessitating some restoration work in Photoshop, but the others are untouched.
| Vintage Pulp | Apr 28 2010 |
My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns hun.
April 1955 issue of Tops, with cover star Betty Brosmer. We’d never heard of this lovely woman before, but we were struck by this image so we looked her up. Turns out she was famous for having the perfect figure, which in her case was 38-18-35. That doesn’t sound perfect to us, so much as structurally unsound, but it is attention-getting. You can see in the two asstastic shots below that her business class rivals anything Kim Kardashian has to offer. Brosmer went on to marry fitness guru Joe Weider, become a fitness guru herself, and co-found Shape magazine, which became a wild success partly by helping women to reduce the size of their asses. Fate is not without a sense of irony.
