Book Review: Playboy Cover to Cover — the 50′s by Playboy and Bondi Digital Publishing
Posted on February 21, 2008 - Filed Under Culture, Photo | Leave a Comment | 152 views
“When the first issue of Playboy hit the streets in 1953, the United States had no counterculture to speak of…the Beats were still a few years away, and Elvis was driving a truck in Memphis. Toting around a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer could get you branded a degenerate, maybe even land you on a chain busting rocks.” – The Los Angeles Times
Since its founding in 1953, with a premiere issue left undated for fear that there wouldn’t be a second, Playboy Magazine has transitioned from an out-of-bounds affront to the supposedly “moral” America of the 1950s, to a veritable national treasure. The Playboy Cover to Cover — the 50′s package features every page of the magazine from its inaugural decade (an archive’s worth of interactive discs), a coffee table book detailing Playboy’s rise, and a facsimile of the first issue.
It is part history text, part nostalgic glance into the past, and a wholly worthwhile read.
The only complaint I’d lodge about the disc portion, and indeed about the entire Cover-to-Cover package, is that it centers around the 1950s. Subsequent decades, especially the 1980s, would have been just as interesting in showing the magazine’s transition from one that men bought and quickly shuffled into their briefcases, to an icon that has featured such interviews as Bob Dylan, and pieces by such notables as William F. Buckley Jr.
The coffee table book, and its 200 plus pages of high-quality, glossy photos, is the MVP here, with the facsimile first issue running a close second. While the discs are better for private enjoyment on one’s personal computer, the coffee table book not only looks good on your coffee table — big shock — it also provides a rare hint of the World Before Hef (that grim reality so aptly described in the L.A. Times passage above).
After a December 1952 alumni review at his high school, during which Hefner was forced to appraise his life in serious fashion for the first time, he stood on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue Bridge “with tears in my eyes, realizing I had to make a change in my life.”
“In Hefner’s case,” Leopold Froehlich writes in the introduction, “the fantasies he had pursued were not to be in vain. The magazine was built on a dream, but it was also the result of a gamble. It expressed the longing a young Hefner felt when he looked up into the brightly lit windows of Gold Coast high-rises, a longing to be liberated from the deadening constraints of domestic America.”
No one handed anything to Hefner. His dream was born largely of his own moxy and seed money from supportive family. They supported the man more than his enterprise, to be sure. Friends and investors who looked askance at the young man — wondering whether they’d ever see their money again — were moved by his unshakable faith that he was doing the right thing.
And that there was an audience dying for his product.
Hefner’s roots and resources may have been humble, but his confidence was king. “I didn’t really think about the possibility of failure,” Hefner told Froehlich. “This was my chance. If I had thought about failure, I wouldn’t have put out a magazine.” That belief paid considerable dividends. The first issue sold 54,000 copies; the last issue of the decade, 1.1 million.
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Tags: bondi digital publishing, coffee table book, hefnerComments
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