Playboy: Entertainment for Men (Issue #1)

Chicago: HMH Publishing Co, 1953. First edition. Near Fine. A Near Fine copy. 280 x 210 mm. Printed in black, white, and red aside from the full-color nude of Marilyn Monroe, the "Sweetheart of the Month." Publisher's white wrappers titled in red and printed with an illustration of Monroe. Crease to one corner of front wrapper and a small smudge near the illustration of Monroe. Otherwise, an excellent copy.

The very first issue of Playboy, which marks the beginning of both the iconic and controversial men's magazine and the global brand. In conceptualizing the magazine, Hugh Hefner (1926 - 2017) imagined an audience of sophisticated, city-dwelling men who eschewed the outdoor activities that preoccupied most contemporary men's magazines in favor of an evening spent "mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the photograph, and inviting a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex" (p. 3). Of course, the magazine also owed much of its popularity to its full-color nude photographs of the "Playmate of the Month" (originally the "Sweetheart of the Month," as here), beginning with Marilyn Monroe in this first issue.

Along with the nude features that made the magazine notorious, Playboy has also published the work of prominent writers and activists over the course of its nearly seventy-five-year run. The writing of Vladimir Nabokov, Ian Fleming, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, James Baldwin were all featured in the magazine throughout the twentieth century, and the famous "Playboy Interview" featured countless famous subjects including Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon and Yoko Ono, David Bowie, Grace Kelly, and the Beatles. The combination of nude photography, high-quality writing and reporting, charming artwork (including the cartoons of Shel Silverstein and Pulitzer winner Jules Feiffer), and shrewd promotion by Hefner drove Playboy to a peak circulation of over five and a half million throughout the 1970s. The magazine eventually expanded into dozens of international editions, about ten of which are still operating digitally or in print, and into clothing, alcohol, and other merchandise labels globally - the Playboy bunny is probably one of the most easily recognizable modern trademarks. Though the magazine's readership has significantly diminished, and print operations have been inconsistent since 2020, Playboy still represents a massive pop cultural force that has, for better or worse, influenced American attitudes around sex and masculinity for the better part of a century. Near Fine.