4 ms·
I have that issue (March 1964). Authors and essayists/interviewees included Rand, Shel Silverstein, P. G. Wodehouse, J. Paul Getty, Arthur C. Clarke, Lenny Bru
by CamperBob 17y ago
I have that issue (March 1964). Authors and essayists/interviewees included Rand, Shel Silverstein, P. G. Wodehouse, J. Paul Getty, Arthur C. Clarke, Lenny Bruce, and the Greek humorist Apuleius. It's just plain jaw-dropping to see how much cultural deterioration we've undergone since then, going by a then-and-now comparison of the magazine's table of contents.
Back in the day, when someone claimed they only read Playboy "for the articles," there was a good chance they weren't lying. It was well worth the 75-cent cover price.
- idlewords 17y agoIt's not cultural deterioration at all. It just happened that the first guy to put real production money into a skin magazine had serious intellectual pretensions. We're all better off for the nice interviews, but there's a reason they had to be bookended with lots and lots of porn for the project to be sustainable. Now that Playboy is a relic instead of the only game in town, they can no longer indulge such expensive tastes. It says nothing about the wider culture except that we've become more accepting of pornography.
- CamperBob 17y agoClose. Actually it was more a case of Comstock-era blue laws requiring serious artistic or literary merit, or at least a semblance thereof, before the magazine could legally be mailed. When the legal climate improved, the need for all of that expensive content went away, at least in Playboy's mind. Which is unfortunate... if someone published a magazine like that today, I'd subscribe to it.