They're as real as ink printed on paper can be. 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.
Mirage's cover star, who's typing in the nude very much the same way we write this website, is identified only as Anna. Inside the issue is a tri-panel centerfold of a model the editors call Alicia, and she's bracketed by other models named Wendy, Kismet, Jan, Ella, Sylvia, etc. All of those are professional names, we assume. Meanwhile the photographers work under probable pseudonyms too, we suspect, such as Don Pleasance and Len Humber. There's no copyright on the magazine, therefore only someone who was around at the time could say for sure when it appeared, and that leaves us out. However, the look of it says mid-1960s to us. It's a nice publication. There are more pages, but only so much scanning time in the world. Maybe we'll return here later and do a more thorough job.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1985—Theodore Sturgeon Dies
American science fiction and pulp writer Theodore Sturgeon, who pioneered a technique known as rhythmic prose, in which his text would drop into a standard poetic meter, dies from lung fibrosis, which may have been caused by his smoking, but also might have been caused by his exposure to asbestos during his years as a Merchant Marine. 1945—World War II Ends
At Reims, France, German General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms, thus ending Germany's participation in World War II. Jodl is then arrested and transferred to the German POW camp Flensburg, and later he is made to stand before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. At the conclusion of the trial, Jodl is sentenced to death and hanged as a war criminal. 1954—French Are Defeated at Dien Bien Phu
In Vietnam, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which had begun two months earlier, ends in a French defeat. The United States, as per the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, gave material aid to the French, but were only minimally involved in the actual battle. By 1961, however, American troops would begin arriving in droves, and within several years the U.S. would be fully embroiled in war. 1937—The Hindenburg Explodes
In the U.S, at Lakehurst, New Jersey, the German zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg catches fire and is incinerated within a minute while attempting to dock in windy conditions after a trans-Atlantic crossing. The disaster, which kills thirty-six people, becomes the subject of spectacular newsreel coverage, photographs, and most famously, Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness report from the landing field. But for all the witnesses and speculation, the actual cause of the fire remains unknown.
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