Paris Nights

Here's a magazine I found a while back:

Nice to know that nudie mags "did their part" for the National Relief Organization back in the day. It's full of mildly smutty cartoons and stories which I will try to scan later once I figure out how to do it without damaging the spine. Meanwhile, here's an ad from the back cover:

 

"Nude Study" indeed!

Hipsters and Hammett in Redbook, 1933

I picked this up a few years ago in Wichita, the issue of Redbook featuring the first appearance of "The Thin Man." It's a full-length novel, although I don't know if the text is precisely the same as the finished book.

It's right purty, though, ain't it? Sorry about the bottom of the scan, the mag was just too big for the scanner. And here's the back cover:

 PBR! That's all it took to be a Hipster back in '33, just frameless glasses and a white moustache and a three-piece suit and a meat fork! Look at the posers in the mirror, trying to out-hip this guy! They look so self-conscious and defeated!

Pepsi Beats the Others Cold

 Here's a beautifully painted and reproduced Pepsi-Cola 39th Anniversary brochure from 1939. Click to enlarge! This is some nice four-color printing, here.

 The Romance of Pepsi-Cola!

 The labs and the cola-nut department!

 These storage tanks look like something by Bruce McCall.

 Raw sugar!

 

How many men drowned in those giant syrup vats?

MORE TO COME!

Out of the Past

Here are some lovely Detective mags I picked up while on the road. This one's pretty old school, from '72. Lots of keen ads.

And here we have a much later example, when instead of "Damsel in Distress" the generic cover theme had mutated to "Hottie with a Firearm."

I find this woman disturbingly exciting, especially with her gun pointed at the words "human flesh."

But this gal, she's the one! There's something about her out-of-date, slathered-on makeup and eighties hairstyle that really get to me. Also, maybe without realizing it I was part of that "Hottie with a Firearm" target demographic. All these mags had pretty good ads, but the genre was hurting enough by the late 80s that much of the back of the book was filled with classifieds. Stay tuned.