Monday, March 23, 2009

Angel is the Centerfold

Did you hear that Playboy has a website [link is so totally NSFW] of full scans of a few dozen issues from their archives? At last -- pornography on the internet!

As with real life, though, the important part isn't the naked ladies, but the things that happen between the naked ladies. There are great vintage ads (check out the selections you can get from those records clubs!), those fabled "articles," cartoons by Shel Silverstein (including his delightfully subversive "Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book"), and more casual misogyny on a single page than in an entire season of Mad Men.

Interestingly, the covers of early issues of Playboy seem to seem to have had a "horrifying anthropomorphised rabbit" design aesthetic. I wonder why they abandoned that for their standard "photos of scantily-dressed or nude women."

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