In praise of vintage Playboy Magazine

Cafe Society
1

I’ve recently started collecting issues of Playboy from the 1970s. A local shop has a big selection of vintage issues in near-mint condition for 4 bucks apiece and I have been buying them up like crazy. This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever read magazines from that era; I don’t read magazines very much in general, except for Maxim and FHM (back in high school) and the occasional Rolling Stone. I’ve got to say, I am just stunned by the level of quality of these 70s Playboys.

I could go on for a long time about all kinds of things that make them so special, but it’s late, so I’ll try to summarize it.

The layout of the magazine. The letters to the editor are arranged so simply and effectively. The articles open with a big interesting first page with unique artwork, sometimes printed on heavier and thicker paper. The ads are integrated into the text tastefully.

The wonderful aesthetic of it. I just love the way things looked in the 70s. The women, of course, were sexy, but also the men were well-dressed and dapper, the cars were stylish, and there was just this wonderfully un-ironic honesty about everything. They were blatantly trying to sell you a lifestyle, an image, of how a hip swinging 70s man should be like, but they were so HONEST about it. I just love that, having been raised in an era of unrelenting chicanery in advertising, and fucking cryptic, pretentious ads that are impossible to decipher.

That’s another thing, the advertisements. They actually make me WANT TO BUY the product being advertised. Why? Because the Playboy ads of the 70s just show a simple photo of what the product looks like (usually accompanied by a mustachioed man and his sexy girlfriend) and then, for Christ’s sake, gives an effective and detailed description of what the product does and what its features are. It seems like such a simple formula and yet the advertisements of today are totally obtuse and not in touch with the viewer at all. These 70s ads on the other hand, whether they be for cars, cologne, underwear, stereos, whatever - there is just something friendly about them, and honest. “Hey, here’s this product. It’s really neat and nifty; it had a lot of great features. Let me tell you about all the different features it has. It can do this. It can do that. Etc, etc.” The text practically dominates the ad, and it’s better that way. More informative.

The articles are fascinating. In my 1973 issue I’ve read about Watergate, about the rise of “Porno Chic” - there’s a fascinating feature on organized crime in the early 1900s, in the vein of “Gangs of New York”, very scholarly and engaging; there’s a long and very in-depth interview with David Halberstam (who my dad actually met and befriended, back when he was a grad student at Yale) about American politics. I know it’s become a big joke - “I get it for the articles” - but, Jesus, the articles in the Playboy of the 70s are better than the articles in the Time and Newsweek of 2009! And there’s this hip sensibility to everything, a kind of edginess that I guess was a product of “new journalism”.

The cartoons, also - the cartoons are just hilarious. Those old cartoons - some of them by guys like Gahan Wilson, who later became very famous - are so raunchy and absurd, it’s impossible not to laugh at them…and they’re like, on every other page! And they’re so colorful too, and drawn with this really flashy 70’s style that I am just a huge sucker for.

In short - I think this magazine, at least during its heyday, is an absolute masterpiece, and I salute Hugh Hefner for bringing all of this creative talent together and producing such an incredible magazine. This is a big part of America’s culture and it’s a landmark of free speech as well, and I am hoping that future generations will look back at it and appreciate it for what it is, and not dismiss it as some mindless rag that their great-grandpa used to whack off to.

2

“Selling a lifestyle” is an accurate way to put it. Hugh didn’t tell you how you should act to be cool. He SHOWED you. It seems like the ads that the magazine had were as much a part of its image as the articles and pictorals. One thing that I noticed was the prevalence of booze ads. One did not see that in “People” or “Time.” I wonder how much of the appearance of the ads was due to the company advertised versus the staff at the magazine.

As a kid in the 70’s, the models were of course the big thing to me. But I remember reading some parts of it and being interested. An excerpt of Clarke’s “2010” really made an impression.

3

Amen, dudes. The loss of content over 30 years is huge.

And it’s not just Hef’s dotage; really, looking at the Playboy of the late 60s to early 80s period, ***or ***indeed a Time or Newsweek (to take two the OP mentioned) from that time period, and then looking at one from today gives you indeed a sense of the impact of Attention Deficit Media (from MTV to Twitter) and the decline and fall of old-school print media.

The “Man Who Reads Playboy” archetype of that vintage age, that is, the lifestyle they were selling (that the reader was supposed to aspire towards… if only he had the money and looks), was a hip swinger who actually would BE hip – in the sense of at least knowing what the serious people were talking about when they mentioned some cultural, artistic, political or social trend. Playboy of 2009, alas, competes with the “lad mags” for the lifestyle marketplace: accept that you’re just a horny doofus who likes to look at tits, buy a lot of brand names just because they’re brand names, and be all ironic when someone mentions any intellectual issue.

4

The magazines of the past were so much more pleasant to read. None of those stuffers that had to be taken out and the table of contents was at the front and not hidden by ten pages of full-page ads. The internet is much more current, has a wider selection of content, and is free, so you’d think they’d try and make reading a magazine a pleasant experience. Same with the newspaper. Trying to find Parade in the Sunday paper takes 5 minutes as it’s stuffed in amongst all the advertising inserts. My local paper even has an annoying half-page that wraps around the funnies’ first page and needs to be removed. Who wants to sit down and spend time de-boning a newspaper before you can start reading. If th epaper is just a vehicle for advertisers then stop charging for it.

5

Gahan Wilson was already famous during the 1970’s:

6

I’m a big fan of “Vintage” magazines from the 50s-80s- National Geographic and Playboy especially, but also Popular Science and that sort of thing too.

I find the ads to be just as interesting as the content in the mag, and there’s certainly a “wholesomeness” in earlier Playboy pictorials that’s lacking from current men’s magazines.

Popular Science is great for all that retro-futuristic Jetsons stuff we really are long overdue for, too.

And the best part about all the “vintage” magazines- if you’re a Mad Men fan- is imagining a bunch of guys in snazzy suits sitting in a Madison Avenue office somewhere, the air thick with cigarette smoke and whiskey fumes, trying to work out the best way to pitch the ad to the magazine’s audience, and the “image” they were trying to create.

7

What was off putting to to me about Playboy was the near slavish devotion to breast enhanced women beginning mainly (IIRC) in the mid to late 80’s. It was as if a switch was flipped and all these magnificent real women (in the sense of being non surgically augmented) were ignored for these athletic, hard bodied women with cartoonish breasts. Granted some natural Playboy models also had large breasts, but they usually had the curves to go along with them. This correlated with a decline in the quality of the articles and just about everything related to the magazine.

By the 90’s the “Playboy Lifestyle” had become a joke and the magazine wasn’t even pretending to be relevant.

8

As a writer, I was told that the place to be published was Playboy in its heyday. So many great writers were published there in the 70s.

9

I have a collection of about 50 issues from the sixties through the late seventies. Just wanted to give this whole thread a big +1, because you already said everything that I would.

10

If there ever was a magazine thread that deserved it’s own sticky…

11

One of my favorite parts of old Playboys. I first read Vonnegut in an old issue (I think they published the first few chapters of Slapstick. I was a kid, so I didn’t manage to track it down 'til years later, well after I’d read other books by him, but even then I could tell he was something special).

Love the men’s fashion spreads, and while the women don’t really do it for me they were cute and somewhat subtle in a pre-cookie cutter blonde kind of way. For the most part, I really do read them for the articles.

12

My grandpa (on my mom’s side, who I never met because he died when she was 16) was one of those guys. After getting a medical discharge from the 111th Airborne during the Korean war, he conned his way into a New York advertising firm by showing them a “portfolio” of his work which was completely lifted from other advertisements. They fell for it, and gave him a job. (I guess it was easier to get away with stuff like this back then; maybe the fact that everyone was always drinking had something to do with it.) Anyway, eventually he became a partner in the firm. I don’t know if it was literally on Madison Avenue but it was during the same era that is depicted in Mad Men.

13

The interviews were very good. The cartoons were great. The stories were by great writers. What was not to like ?

14

I saw what you did there.
To the OP: I grew up on these. My father had a subscription for decades, and I knew where they were stashed in the closet. First I swiped them for the titties. Then I started understanding the cartoons. My first exposure to one of America’s greatest humorists (Jean Shepherd) was in the pages of Playboy. It’s shocking that most of his material has never been collected and republished.

15

Little Annie Fanny! The great Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder. Ah memories! Or should that be mammaries?

16

Yes, these were amazing. By the way, R. Crumb credits them as a huge influence on his art.

17

'Fraid I was an ‘Oh Wicked Wanda’ fan myself - ah, who am I kidding, us kids took whatever we could smuggle from our days… (and yes, I did read all the Wanda episodes when somebody posted them on the web awhile back).

Anyway, seems there was this radio personality way back, name of Shepherd, who often told interesting (and embellished) stories of childhood in the (industrial) Midwest during his shows - these stories were later published in Playboy. Later on the stories were collected into books such as ‘In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash’, ‘Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories’ and ‘A Fistful of Fig Newtons’, which finally were adapted into ‘A Christmas Story’ - which is definately a kid favorite nowadays - so Playboy needs to get back to it’s traditional target audience - pre-teens and children…

18

It became a joke in later years, but we really DID read it for the articles.

19

Yep, all around awesome – and doubly so for the ladies. You can’t even find natural women of that caliber in print any longer.

20

Playboy has posted 53 vintage issues here.
(obviously NSFW) h ttp://playboy.covertocover.com/