“Or can it?”Įverything that wasn’t charming or smartly prescient, however, horrified me. On the next page, an ad for the ACLU gives the Statue of Liberty a Hitler mustache. An interview about climate change seemed to defy chronology by echoing warnings we heard just yesterday regarding human population increases, declining resources, and even a defense of abortion rights. A story about self-driving cars offered both quaint and surprisingly ambitious views of “the future,” describing work on an “automated guideway” in which self-driving cars would propel hundreds or thousands of commuters to work each day at 100 miles per hour - meanwhile depicting “future women” in outfits closely resembling Princess Leia’s (in)famous gold bikini. Many of the issues’ articles were forward-thinking. (“You don’t wanna know,” he told the interviewer on-record - but with the recorder turned off - about how much money Richard Nixon got paid to get Hoffa out of prison, he claimed.) An in-depth interview with Jimmy Hoffa shortly before his disappearance made my jaw drop. The ratio of text to images favored the former, the weight of each magazine making me consider what the average human attention span in the US must have been before the internet. A gorgeous, cobalt-blue Colt 45 ad proclaimed, “Bottom’s up!” in upside down writing under an upside down beer glass, while ads for cigarettes and bell-bottoms, both equally seductive, graced every fourth page. Though they may well have been infested with bed bugs, the old magazines proved almost charming. I find the history of popular magazines fascinating, so he correctly figured the Playboys would make a welcome addition to my personal library.
My brother showed up at my door last month with a stack of ‘70s-era Playboy magazines that he’d come across on the street outside my apartment.