Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Great browsing fun, 19 Dec 2008
I've had volumes 3 & 4 for a couple of days and have been thrilled and very amused by them. I haven't particularly been conscious of the chronological order of things, perhaps because I'm mostly rather aimlessly flicking through them.
I'm far more interested in the way the girls themselves look, behave, dress/undress etc. than the development of these magazines. The 1960s is characterised by a typically voluptuous figure at the beginning to middle of the decade and there's lots of long hair throughout. The posing tends to be of a generally passive, cute nature and I enjoyed that. The underwear is important because in the mainstream US publications, pubic hair couldn't be displayed in the titles on sale in newsagents throughout the decade. That shouldn't put you off! For me, burlesque makes it more exciting. It's easy to get very nostalgic about the whole thing.
The writing is intelligent and incisive, but unlike Playboy (in my opinion), that doesn't get in the way of the girls. Note that all the text is in English, French and German throughout. Mostly side by side. Publisher Taschen does a lot of that.
The books are large, so make sure you can think of a place to put them when not in use. I wouldn't recommend the coffee table unless your visitors are broad-minded. Other than that, don't think twice - buy them. You won't regret it.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning Book, 17 Aug 2008
This is an absolutely stunning book as with all Taschen books. Anything with Dian Hanson heading it is always top quality and always delivers . If you are interested in mens magazines this is the set to own. Even at full price this would be a bargain. Highly recommended.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The sort men like, 3 Dec 2004
I can't think of another publisher, other than Taschen, who would risk publishing a six-volume, extravagantly produced history of men's magazines and who better than Dian Hanson to write it. She has had plenty of experience in this section of the magazine trade.
This volume covers the fourteen years from 1945 and really it is not too interesting until Hefner starts Playboy in 1953. Until then the market was basically down-market cheesecake and burlesque oriented magazines though there are chapters devoted to John Willie's 'Bizarre' and Lenny Burtman's 'Exotique' but these were hardly mass-market titles. Chapter three, nicely, features titles from Argentina and Mexico and chapter six covers England. Playboy was the title that makes this history interesting, unique when it first came out but not for long, titles like Nugget, The Dude, Swank, Rogue and others made this genre of publishing sort of respectable.
The seventeen chapters follow the same format, a few hundred words of copy and then pages and pages of covers and spreads from the various titles. Chapter sixteen features the Top 5 Cover girls, Diane Webber, June Wilkinson, Jayne Mansfield, Bettie Page and predictably Marilyn as number one. Chapter seventeen is a neat finale, devoted to the tacky ads that appeared in the back of many men's titles. Major advertisers totally shunned most of this market for obvious reasons.
Fascinating though the book is I do have a major disappointment (so four stars) and that is the paper, a matt stock that soaks up the ink so that none of the covers sparkle. I've bought several other pop culture Taschen books this year and they have all had semi gloss stock that reproduces covers and illustrations so well. There are a few hundred colour covers in 'The History of Men's Magazines' and frequently the whole page ones look soft and grainy, they are, after all, reproduced from something already printed, a different paper would have mostly avoided this. Another slight annoyance is the three-language text (English, French and German) all set in the same typeface so at the end of a column one naturally goes to the next column and it is German. To my mind it would have been preferable to run each language in its own text block.
Apart from the paper I thought the book was well worth having and if you
read the Product Description you'll see what the other five volumes cover. When complete I think this will become the definitive work about this corner of the publishing world. I'm already making shelf-room for the set.
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by Dian Hanson
by Taschen Publishing
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