Thank You Veterans / WWII Era Scans

My grandfather passed away in early 2008, and I find myself thinking about him often around Veterans Day. I feel a bit strange that it's not Christmas or Thanksgiving or the other family holidays that makes me constantly reminisce about him but so it goes. When he died, I certainly wasn't able to eulogize him at his funeral, as there is no way I could have kept it together. A couple of years have passed, and maybe I'm just now able to deal, but then again how does one ever really grieve properly. I called up my grandmother today to be of comfort in case she was feeling sad, and she wasn't home. Instead, I heard my grandfather's doddering voice on the answering machine. My grandmother still has not changed the message since he died, and I found myself sobbing like a baby, maybe because I've been thinking about all this for the past couple weeks. I used to always wonder why she left it on there, but now I guess I find it strangely comforting.

He was 82 when he died and was pretty much a shell of his former self by the time he gave up the ghost. I'm very thankful that he hung on long enough to be around for the birth of my two children, but by the end he was pretty vacant. He'd witnessed all his friends die before him, the prize of the long-aged, and years of smoking cigarettes had taken their toll. Still he had my grandmother, and it is hard to let a loved one go. He led a full life, and I hate to view his existence only through the lens of his military service, but in many ways I think it made him the man he was. And even though there are many strong men in my family, there will never be another one remotely like him. If the shrapnel that damaged his hearing during the war had been a little more effective, no one in that side of the family including yours truly would be around to tell the tale.

He was a proud Marine and served in the Pacific Theater during most of WWII. Trained in some sort of secret radar which he never used, he would go on to serve as a gunner of various small aircraft and later in the war was on the ground at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and many other islands in the Pacific. He did like to talk about the war, but he almost never talked about specific battles. He'd talk about taking all those pigeons for all their pay in some enormous poker game, or his time on shore leave, or getting terribly sunburnt playing tennis all day on some slab the military had poured on some little island, or of the strange and beauteous cultures of the islanders he encountered. My grandmother's mentioned a few times that she's awoken with his hands around her neck with him screaming in some flashback to terrible events clearing those islands of Japanese soldiers, but like most of that generation, he kept those horrors to himself.

The two things I loved most about my granddad, I think he picked up in the war, the first being an amazing level of comfort in talking with other people. Whether he was shooting the shit with doctors and lawyers at the golf course or joking around with a rural farmer at Wal-Mart (two groups I might admittedly feel out of place around), he was always at ease, and I think this might be something he picked up during the war. All those boys from all over America came together for a common purpose, and after meeting all these guys he was cowed by or surprised by no one. Born a master bullshitter, he could make anyone smile. When he'd take me on a fishing trip or wherever we might be headed, he eschewed the highways in favor of the backroads and relished getting out there in the nooks and crannies of America. This would suit him well in his long and successful career as an advertising consultant for mom and pops furniture stores in small towns all over the country.

The second thing I think he took away from the war was an indomitable spirit, a can-do attitude that was infectious. That generation pulled together and stepped up in the face of enormous odds, protecting the liberty of the American people and as far as I'm concerned the liberty of the globe. After that, what can't you do? I recently watched the excellent HBO miniseries The Pacific and it really made me realize how tough those guys had it in the Pacific. He told me once that after surviving the war, it's all gravy, and the positive and joyful way he lived his life was convincing of the fact.

We didn't always see eye to eye on politics and other matters, but we always had a great time talking about just about anything. He had some bass ackwards views on certain things, but I think in the past decade I've come to realize what an asset that generation was to our political discourse. When I was a teen, I'll admit to having the thought that, well, once all these old-timers are gone with their conservative views, America will be a better place. I was wrong. Sure that generation might have in some ways operated against what I'd call social progress, but they were civil, reasonable, and possessed common sense. When I talk to elder seniors about politics or current events, I'm almost always impressed with how informed they are and with their wisdom. After 30+ years of the culture wars and what I view as a breakdown in the traditional media, America is heavily lacking in many of the qualities that that greatest generation brought to the table. Whether we are fighting the combined war machines of Tojo and Hitler or massive debt and a plundered economic system and heartless plutocracy, we're still all in this together, and I wish we'd act like it. Ah well, enough of that.

My granddad rests at Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery in KS, and, though we never really thought of him as a military man (except he did shave every day of his life and ran a tight ship),our family is happy to have him rest with his brothers in arms and appreciated the military ceremony when he was laid to rest. He loved meeting other Marines and dishing out friendly insults to the oldtimers he'd meet from the other services. I know he went through hell out on those islands, and I thank him and all who have served in our military.

Anyways, I've been thinking about the guy and reading a little WWII History, so I thought I'd put together some scans from the era, my way of reaching out and touching the past. Beyond working with books and magazines of the era, there are all sorts of rewarding digitization projects in WWII History. The time is now while there's still some of these guys around because there's not many left. I've seen some amazing photo albums from WWII veterans, and if you've got one in your family, you might consider putting it on the glass. Instead of just having one person in your fam as the holder of the photos, scan them, and every single person in your family or who will come into your family in the future will have the chance to have that unique tie to the past. I know I'm going to ask my grandma about scanning my granddad's flight book with the record of all the places he went during WWII and while I'm at it I hope to scan the whole damn family album. Our ties to History should be nourished, and we've got more tools to do that in the digital age with the ability to easily capture and share images, audio, and video. Hop to it!

It's late, and though I did manage to finish all but one of the scans I had planned for today, I'm just gonna post one and keep the others coming over the next few days.

American Library 02 Guadalcanal Diary (1943.McKay)

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Get the cover to cover scan here of this interesting illustrated adaptation of Richard Tregaskis' Guadalcanal Diary. This publication is listed in the Overstreet comic guide, but besides it being in the pamphlet format, I certainly wouldn't think of it as a comic. It follows along and takes excerpts from the book and is adorned by a nice cover and illustrations throughout by Edgar Franklin Wittmack who had a long career working in both the slicks and the pulps.

The American invasion at Guadalcanal was our first big push back at the Japanese after Pearl Harbor and other Japanese aggression in the Pacific and was meant to prevent Australia from becoming isolated by Japanese forces. We landed our troops safely and caught the Japanese off guard, but they would try mightily to retake the island. Tregaskis was a volunteer correspondent and his book became an immediate success and was made into a film the following year:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035957/

Because of Tregaskis' description of the camaraderie amongst Marines, the USMC still makes Guadalcanal Diary required reading for all officer candidates. I wasn't terribly thrilled by Tregaskis' style, but I plan to add the full book to my WWII reading list. You can most certainly find a copy in your local library or Google Books has it available digitally online here:

Guadalcanal Diary at Google Books

A Map of the area and the title page:


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I really like how Tregaskis makes a point to give the hometown of every soldier he writes about. This page immediately jumped out as me because this soldier is from my hometown of Lawrence, KS, and is a fellow Jayhawk. Amerine's account seems too incredible to be true, but he was indeed awarded the Silver Star for his travails and would go on to lead fighter squadrons and a career in the military after the war. I don't recall going to school with any Amerines, but it sounds like they'd have been some tough sonsabitches:


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and a couple more art samples from Wittmack:





Thanks to my man McCoy for his edit of tonight's scan, and we'll be back next time with more magazines from wartime. Again, thank you veterans, your sacrifices are not forgotten.

How to Scan! Pt. 2 Put That Sucker on the Glass

Today I’m going to type a little about the actual process of scanning a book or what we scanners refer to as “rawing” a book (however the hell you are supposed to spell it). By this I mean the part of the process in which I prepare the book for scanning and produce the raw images I will later be editing and processing into the files I share here.

First things first, get comfortable! Set up your scanner so that it is easy for you to operate and so that you have plenty of room to move about. I like to put my scanner on a piano bench adjacent to my desk, so that I never have to lean too far to operate it. I’ll be putting up pictures of my setup as I go here to make this all a bit more clear and because a post is much more fun with pictures.



The scanning stage of the process is really my favorite step. I sit down to scan, put on an album or maybe click on a ballgame or a documentary (nothing that requires my full visual attention) and just zone out for a bit. The mundane task of flipping pages kind of allows me to zone out in a half-assed variety of meditation that I find very relaxing. This step goes most quickly if I avoid distractions. Surfing the web, reading scans, e-mailing, etc. can turn a 15 minute scan into an hours long scan, so I try, not always successfully, to keep a steady pace going.

First, you will want to set up your scanning software to send your images to a certain folder you set up on your computer, I’ve got mine named “scanner incoming” and all of my various scanners send their images to this single folder. When I scan a magazine or a comic, I do not want to fuss with the images as they come in because this is very distracting and inefficient. I might check my results in the first few pages just to make sure I like what I’m getting, but beyond that I only check from time to time that I haven’t skipped any pages.

What I want in my raw scans is an unadulterated image that looks exactly like the page it is coming from. Sure, you can set up your scanner software to alter the images as they come in, but this is often like using a hacksaw instead of a scalpel. Photoshop (or whatever image processing program you are using, more on this topic later) is a far superior tool for adjusting images than your scanner’s software, so I try to minimize alterations or automatic adjustments. For some scanners' software this will mean adjusting the pre-scan settings or auto-leveling. Most often this means tweaking down the brightness, contrast, and even saturation until the raw scan looks uniformly like what you see on the page itself. Sometimes it will even be necessary to adjust the white, black, or neutral in levels.
At this stage, you will want to pick a file format and dpi setting for your scans that you are comfortable with. The raw scans that you get directly from your scanner should be of the utmost quality, and the raw images we work with are much, much larger than compressed images that go out in the final scan. Personally, I like to go with a lossless format and scan to .tif. Other scanners I know scan to .bmp or .png, but at the very least I suggest going with an uncompressed .jpeg. While the size for a single image you get here might seem very large, I feel that it’s worth it, and an average computer will still slice and dice these images in the processing stage fairly quickly. I like to keep all of my raw scans for perpetuity in case I want to revisit a scan for a new or different edit and just to have an unadulterated archive around. Sure, this can take up a lot of room, but even a large scan might take up .25 or .50 worth of hard drive space, and, if I care enough to put a scarce or valuable book on my scanner that no other soul might ever care to scan again, this seems like a very small cost indeed. Other guys I know, though, will just toss their raws when they’ve gotten a final product and there’s nothing wrong with that especially for common publications. If you have the desire to revisit an old scan, often a fresh scan with a newer machine and up-to-the-minute techniques gets the best result.

As for dpi setting, there’s considerable debate on the optimum setting. Many professional or archival scanning guidelines I’ve seen suggest a 600 dpi setting, while there are many good scanners that get great results with settings as low as 200 dpi. 600 dpi most definitely is greater than the original printing setup of vintage (or even modern) material, but it also insures that line work is captured accurately and that small fonts are perfectly legible. Of course, scanning at 600 dpi yields an image of a much greater pixel width than the screens that scans will be viewed upon. Some scanners feel that scanning in higher dpi leads to a “grittier” look than is achieved with a smaller setting or that such a high setting is overkill. They might be right. On the other hand, if you scan at too low of a resolution, you are increasing the risk of moiré in the scan and can end up making small fonts illegible or making fine line work blocky. These days, I scan at 400 dpi (in the past I’ve scanned at 300dpi which is probably sufficient) which I find to be a nice compromise between speed and image quality. One other factor to consider here is that most OCR programs are going to work best with at least 300 dpi.

Moving on (geez I ramble), let’s continue to the scan itself. The number one enemy of a good scan is failing to get the page flat on the glass. Spine shadow is awfully annoying, and even the slightest curvature and waviness in the raw scan can make text illegible or distort artwork. When I told McCoy that I was doing a how-to, his first response was “tell em to pull the staples!!!” And while this no doubt makes most collectors cringe, it is indeed the best recipe for a good scan. But please do not let this stop you. If you have a rare book and are willing to scan it but do not want to destroy it, please do scan it even if you are not willing to take it apart, it’s much appreciated no matter what. Just make sure that you are using a heavy book or weights on the scanner lid to get your book as flat as possible. I’ve personally come to the conclusion that for most material, pulling the staples is the best way to go. In fact, for cheap pulps or squarebound magazines, sacrificing the book is really the logical choice. Even for valuable golden age comics, I find pulling the staples is the best choice. Besides yielding a flatter image and more page space to work with, the stress on a spine of folding it back and forth 36 times or pressing down on it with the scanner lid is greater than the risk of snapping a staple in the process or enlarging the staple holes. When I first started deconstructing books and magazines, I would sweat bullets in this stage, but really I do enjoy it. And because I’m something of an anti-collector (paper is only a vessel – unless we are talking about my girlie pulp collection :D) this comes naturally to me.

I scanned a pulp last night (which will be showing up here on Thursday, hopefully!, in a series of scans McCoy and I are doing for Veterans Day) and took some pictures of the process to show that you can do this with minimal damage to your pulp if you are careful. Let me make a disclaimer here that this works better with pages that aren’t so brittle. A pulp can look great, but if the pages are brittle, it’s not going to fare well in this process. This is one reason I’m skeptical of much of the grading that goes on with comics and pulps. I’ve gotten mid or high grade pulps that look really nice, but if the paper is brittle, I’d rather just have a well-read, browning-but-supple beater copy.

So this particular pulp is probably an issue that I’d normally be far rougher with, but I plan on giving it to my granny when I go home for Xmas (as it was given to me by a fellow scanner to have my way with) and I was thinking of this post, so I went through the process of pulling staples and reassembling. But before you start to take anything apart, get some scans of the covers and spine, just in case they suffer damage in the debind process.

The victim:

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A nice, solid reading grade pulp and pretty much the condition I like for a scanning copy. The cover is complete with a little creasing and tattering about the edges. The spine is near complete. The pages are browning but supple. Of course, we often have to go with the most affordable copies we can find, but a copy like this is going to come out of the other side of the process about like you see it here. High grade pulps usually don’t fare as well. But don’t let me talk you out of it! By any means necessary, I say, paper degrades, glory is forever! :p
Cough, but on with the program. Pulling staples can be a bit delicate, but just go slow and take your time and the patient will be O.K. First I open up the back cover so that I can get to the backside of the staples, taking care not to bend the back cover over too much.


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Next, I use a set of needle-nose micro pliers to carefully bend the staples straight.

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Then I turn the magazine up so that the front and back cover are lying flat. Now I can pull those puppies.

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This step can be tricky. Sometimes, the staples come right out. Other times, they take some coaxing. You can use the micro pliers to push carefully from the back side or to grab them from the front if you aren’t able to manipulate them out by hand. Go slow and be patient, you can do it!

Set aside the staples in a manner so that you remember exactly how they came out of the book. For comics in particular this is important so that the staples go back in easily. If the staples are rusty, this is a great chance to spray them with a little WD40 and prevent further damage to the book. A caveat here on rusty staples, they sometimes snap! If a set of staples is really rusty on a pricey comic, you could skip the debind. If a staple snaps, I’ll usually replace with an extra staple of a similar vintage…



Now, you can pull out all of the loose pages, leaving only the pages that are actually glued in at the spine.


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Now the book is ready to scan. The pages still attached to the magazine are a little trickier and may not end up perfectly flat, but there will be no spine shadow encroaching on any text in the scan. I use a book placed atop a thicker backer board to assist in getting the page flat.


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Scanning the loose pages will go very fast and the images will be perfectly flat. In the second pic, you can see how I have one set of pages on the left of the scanner and that as I scan them I have another pile on the right. When I get to the middle leaf of each section, I move the pile from the right over to where the pile from the left was and continue as before. BTW that white strip you see on my scanner bed can help on some models make a scanner’s auto-leveling more even. Some scanner software levels every page by picking the lightest and darkest points, so having some true white on the bed can aid in getting truer colors.


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When you are done, it’s time to reassemble, though you’ll want to double check that you have all of pages for your scan in hand. It is truly frustrating to put a book back together and realize that you’ve missed a couple of pages. When you put the sections back in the appropriate place in the book, you can use a backer board placed in the center of the section to help get the pages all the way to the spine. Re-inserting the staples can be a little tricky in a pulp, but with a little patience it’s easily done.

Here’s the old girl post-scan. Minus some pulp flakes here and there, she’s in exactly the same shape as when I started. I could almost say, in mock indignation, one of my granddad’s oft-used lines - “I never laid a hand on the broad!”:

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The mention of pulp flakes reminds me, you will need to clean your scanner bed often when working with pulp, especially a brittle issue. I use a lens cloth from a camera store, but there are a variety of microfiber products out there that won’t scratch your glass. Keeping the glass clean is very important, one prominent but unnoticed smudge or hair can ruin a whole scan. Periodically, you will want to give your glass a more thorough cleaning with isopropyl alcohol. Be wary of using conventional glass cleaner because the ammonia can react with coating on some scanner beds. More occasionally than that, you might need to clean the underside of your glass as well as that damn pulp gets everywhere.

And I might as well post what one of these raw pages looks like. The raw 400 dpi .tif I get weighs in at 35.1 MB (the end result I will end up sharing will be probably about 800kb so you see the enormous size difference). I’ve got to shrink the thing way down just to get it hosted, but this pic will give you some idea of the color I’m after:


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Once you have all of your raws for the issue you are working on, put them in a folder unto themselves. I use a renamer program to then tag each image with the page number and the issue it came out of. Some scanner software lets you do this pre-scan, but if you miss pages, have to rescan pages, etc., this is more trouble than it’s worth. Most renamer programs will let you name all of the files in a folder numerically, even when there are gaps in the sequence. Having each page named well is good archival policy and it prevents the possible loss of pages should many files with “image 0001” get thrown in together by accident.

And while I’m thinking about it, here are some links that are of using in the debinding process for newer glue-bound publications, thanks to these scanners for sharing their helpful tips:

http://hem.bredband.net/pnyxtr/scanning/iron_debind.html

http://193.170.75.13/~e0225705/rebinding.html

I hope this has been a fairly coherent post. After a four hours of typing away, I’m not so sure I’ve kept my focus - a common occurrence after my time at the keyboard, nyuk, nyuk.

I will continue with this series on how to scan very soon with an installment on image processing and some different editing options a scanner has to choose from, but tomorrow I'll interrupt this series with some WWII material that I’m scrambling to get done in honor of Veterans Day.

How to Scan! Pt. 1 Picking a Scanner

Well, well, well. I take my eye off the ball, look up, and see it’s been three months since my last post, my apologies. Last time I promised an exploration of the term “pulp”, and I will get to that sometimes murky question soon, but today I’ve set aside an hour or few for something I probably should have done long ago, a post on how to scan a magazine. I’ve received numerous inquiries into my methods, and I am more than happy to share some thoughts on the scanning process. I will try and keep it simple and stick to the basics, but please excuse if I geek out here and there. Also please remember, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and opinions vary widely on the best way to produce a great scan. Let me preface all this, also, with the caveat that scanning is a very strange pursuit and will not be for everyone. Most people who do it really have a passion for the material they scan or for the idea of sharing their books because they have enjoyed reading scans from others. And then are those strange characters who, like me, enjoy the process and find it a relaxing pastime.

The Machine

Most people that decide they want to try and make a scan will just use whatever machine they have on hand, and that’s a-ok. But if you are going to be scanning often, it is worth a little time in choosing the right scanner to suit your purposes. If you scan for long enough, you will likely figure out that scanners, like many electronic devices, are basically disposable. The cost of servicing a scanner (replacing the bulb and tuning-up) with shipping costs is usually about as much as just buying a new one. Some signs of a dying scanner are red or yellow lines (which can be just a sign that a fiber has gotten stuck to your bulb and that the bulb and mirror need to be cleaned by using compressed air or a swab with a bit of alcohol on it), fading or uneven blacks, or prominent moiré patterns that were not there before. If your scanner is dying, getting a new one is preferable to the editing gymnastics necessary to fix the image, and some raw scans just cannot be helped. Put that lame horse out to pasture, eh?

There are basically four options I’d consider when picking a scanner. A standard flatbed, an “edge” model, an A3 (oversized) flatbed scanner, and a photo scanner.

A4 flatbeds are by far what most of the scanners out there are using. As a general rule, I’d stay away from all-in-one units (scanner plus printer), as I had a rough time with my first HP all-in-one, and the raws I’ve seen from all-in-one units generally are lower quality than a standalone scanner. The main two brands that scanners use are Epsons and Canons. For a majority of my scans, I use the Epson v300, and, when it dies, I will probably check out the v500 (which is faster). The v300 is the scanner that I am recommending as the best all-purpose scanner. The pros: long-life (McCoy is still on his first v300 and I’d guess closing in on 1000 magazine scans), sharp raws, software that is very compatible across operating systems, the option to scan film, and an affordable cost. The cons: pre-scan settings require a lot of tweaking and the scanner glass is sunk in to the unit a bit making a ridge than can crease pages when the lid is closed if you are scanning loose leafs.

“Edge” scanner - Here I’m talking about the Plustek Opticbook 3600 which I assume has the patent on the edge design, otherwise other manufacturers would surely be using it. The edge scanner is built so that a book can hang off the edge, so that you can scan books without spine shadow with little damage to the binding. A pic so you can see what I’m talking about.



You do lose about 1/8th to a ¼ of an inch of the page at the spine, but this is really a great feature for scanning books and especially for minimizing damage while scanning pulps. I’m on my second plustek and use it when I need the edge feature (I use it mainly for the high grade or expensive pulps). The pros: besides the edge design, this scanner sports a blazing fast speed of seven seconds for a full sized page at 300 dpi. You will be hard-pressed to keep up with the thing. Also, this machine gives perfect color on your raws every time. No pre-scan tweaking is necessary, and I think the software is generally marvelous (though, I have heard that finding the right driver for newer operating systems can be a pain). The cons: cost and durability – Almost every single scanner I know who has bought one ends up seeing lines in their raws at a year or before, so the bulb life is a big problem. The scanner costs about $250 bucks, so this is pretty much unacceptable. Add to this that their customer service is poor and the turnaround on getting a machine serviced is often months (and they don’t even always get it right the first time), and I tend to warn people away from this machine. That said, I know a few guys that have bought another after their first died out of warranty (1 year). An incredible but flawed machine.

A3 Scanners are a good choice if you are going to be working with over-sized magazines or will be using your scanner to scan in canvasses and the like. Pretty much the only affordable A3 is the Mustek USB 1200 (@$150, the next step up is about a grand). Pros: it’s an A3, you can scan big mags or tabloids or two pages at a time on smaller publications. Cons: Clunky software and driver, lack of a scan button (you have to use a graphic interface on your computer), middling image quality, slow speeds. Despite these cons, I like having a Mustek. I do not recommend it as a primary scanner, though, unless you will be scanning large items.

Camera scanners – I’m not very familiar with these, but here’s what they look like. This is a picture of a professional-make (there are at least a couple of companies that make these, this is just the first one I could find, I make no recommendation having never used it)



And here is a DIY model:



You can find out more about these DIY makes from this site which has all sorts of designs and is where people come together to talk about new designs. Though I probably would never move away from my flatbed scanners, I think what these folks are doing is very cool.

Pros: Blazing fast speeds, no damage to the book. Cons: Image quality, problems with curvature and glare, the professional makes are expensive. The scans I’ve seen made with photo scanners are almost uniformly of a lesser quality, though I have seen a scanner or two achieve excellent results with their own makes.

My blogging time’s up for today, and I’ve hardly covered any ground, surprise, surprise. Back tomorrow with more “how to”…

Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary (1945)

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Clyde Prettyman is the artist.

Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary (1945.T.W.O.Charles)(D&M).cbr
Get the cover to cover scan here!!!

A fantastic find, tonight's edition is hot off the scanner, can you dig, daddy-o? Bound by a single staple, and a little bit larger than the pocket mag of the 50s, here's your travel guide into the land of jive. The thought of translating jive brings to mind these guys from Airplane:



Which just might not be too off-base, as editor Lou Shelley writes on the inside cover of the lure of black slang. If you don't read this book, you just won't know, Jackson, so get hep.


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And to back up the hepcat cred, the dictionary pages are punctuated by photos of R&B, jazz, and swing musicians, somewhat crudely printed, but a fun who's who of the music world of the day, contents and photolisting:


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A couple of photo samples, beginning with one of my faves, the Nat King Cole Trio. Nat King Cole was always smooth as silk, and Oscar Moore was a fantastic guitarist, ahead of his time and definitely one of the pioneers of jazz guitar. And if you want jive cred, you can't forget Satchmo:


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Before I talk about some of the fun words inside, though, I think it's good to talk about this funky little pub as part of a broader movement that was really picking up steam in the 40s (I'm thinking comic/magazines like Miss America, Keen Teens, Teen Life, etc) with the emergence of the modern youth market, that is, publications and advertising were for the first time directed exactly towards teens and the youngest adults (which has grow over time into the behemoth it is today). I remember in Bradford Wright's 2003 book, Comic Book Nation, Wright takes an askance look at oft-vilified crusader against comics, Frederic Wertham. At the base of Wertham's oft-absurd claims, says Wright, is a real concern for the fact that publishers are now selling books directly to children and the publishers see this market ripe for exploitation instead of an audience to be cultured (essentially an anti-capitalist argument?). The publishers were out to make a buck and meant to give the kids what they wanted (horror! cheesecake! crime!) instead of what they needed (literature without pictures that will make them good adults). And certainly many comics from he golden age ARE unsavory to the point where I wouldn't want my kids reading them. But Wertham was aware of what much of society didn't really catch on to, that is, that publications were now being made for sale directly to children and many parents never even thought to look at what might be inside. Society was now affluent enough and printing now cheap enough, where a kid could afford the dime a comic or pulp would cost, and the kids were crazy for them. For a more on Wertham and when this all comes to a head, I highly recommend David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague. It's not only of interest to golden age comic book fans but is also insightful as a broader history of the paranoia and congressional hearing circuses of the post-war era. Much of the book comes from interview material, and it's great to hear what the kids who were there at the comic burnings have to say today on the subject.

But back to the dictionary - a cool look at the state of slang over 60 years ago. I doubt most words in here were ever in common usage, but who knows. Some slang phrases hit a tipping point and catch on nationally only to be discarded a few years later, while some bits of slang are practiced only by the outcast groups that use them and passed down through the decades like a sort of musician or druggie or hipster's code. Of course, today, we have the Urban Dictionary online to help us out, truly an invaluable resource when it comes to slang. Who says the web's good for nothing, eh? Warning to the PC crowd, there are offensive words for racial and social groups included in the dictionary, but they seem to be equal opportunity about it, and when you go digging around in old pubs - you will find dirt, so there it is.

I'll just mention a few groups of words from the first section. Here's a series of words that are now in common usage, still going strong:



This second group are some I'm not familiar with or that aren't used too much in these forms, but I like. I wish they'd survived. Maybe it's not too late!



And a small group of words still in usage but with different meanings today. Take note, misinterpretations or misuse on many of these counts could spell trouble



And dare I forget to mention, big thanks to McCoy, an alreet fellow and strictly solid, for doing the edit work on the scan. It was cut poorly with bits of text missing, but he fixed it right up for hard drives everywhere.

Next time! Sticking with the dictionary theme - a definition - just what is "pulp" anyways?!

Love Street, June 1968 / Happy Birthday, America!

Well, once again, I've been neglecting my blog for Summer play and Summer chores, but so it goes. Today, I thought I'd share an interesting underground with a topical cover, Happy Birthday, America.

 

I don't know much about this publication and take the date from the gentleman that sold it to me. Coming out of the Haight-Ashbury, this pub shows a tendency towards art and poetry. There is some political content (including a grisly page reprinted from Vietnam GI) but the emphasis is towards the arts and maybe towards pages that can be used as posters. I love the red and blue inks on this issue. I do not know any details about this paper other than the fact that I found reference to issue 2 from September of 1967. They must be somewhat scarce, as I've only ever run across this single issue on ebay.

I offer two versions of the scan. Here is the edited version, and here is the raw scan. It was so highly processed, I offer the raw scan in case it better captures the feel of the pub.

A few samples. The back side of the centerfold, a Declaration of Cultural Evolution.

And the centerfold, a great printing of Wally Wood's Disneyland Memorial Orgy 

Wally Wood is bar none one of my favorite comics (and pulp!) artists and I get a real kick out of this piece, Disneyland Memorial Orgy (wiki). He did not admit to drawing this poster til years later. After sitting through Cinderella 3 (a straight to video item I believe, along with such ill advised sequels as Dumbo 2, Bambi 2, etc), I smile at the dollar signs emanating from the castle in the background. The underground had some other run-ins with Disney including a suit over Air Pirate Funnies, though I think it's only natural to play with such weighty and weightless icons. Today, I see artists tooling around with the Simpsons in such a fashion, perhaps Mickey has lost some of his centrality. (There will be some lampooning of Disney's characters in the Ballyhoo I share next time, so Disney had inspired dirty lampooning for decades before the underground got to him).

And lastly, the back cover

 

Next: Ballyhoo!!!

Hey Ladies

Sigh, I spent too much of a beautiful Sunday trying unsuccessfully to unclog a drain that managed to cover my laundry room with debris from the kitchen sink, but here I am, as promised, to continue a short tour of some vintage girlie magazine scans. Again tonight, click on the issue title to download the scan.

I'll kick off tonight with what is probably my favorite of these magazines in my collection.

My wife likes to tease me about my affair with my scanner - and here is a fine Mistress indeed. A very well-done magazine.

Mistress v01n04 (1966-04.D and R)

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Another excellent magazine full of cuties. I think the cover design is absolutely outstanding.

California Girl 08 (1973-01.Phenix)

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Here's a neat one that is a bit experimental. The cover does not extend all the way to the edge of the magazine (leading to a fold open front cover) and there are some strange brownish graphics pages.

Mister Cool v01n01 (1960.Billingsley)

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And issue one and three of Rapture (love the name), a pre-Parliament magazine from Milton Luros.

Rapture v01n01 (1959.Tower)

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Rapture v01n03 (1959.Beacon)

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And lastly, two magazines I think are somehow related though I can't pin that down. I had an uncle who liked to talk about handing out wolf-tickets, so I'm completely loving this magazine.

Wolf Bait 02 (1959.Zee Zee)

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This is a "pitchbook," sort of an advertising pamphlet for performers, published by Zee Zee Martine, a dancer featured within, and it features a number of famous burlesque artists of the day. A very interesting little pub, wider than a pocket magzine but tall (like Fling) with an amateur feel that was nonetheless very well done. A mix of pics, cartoons, jokes, articles, a bit of fetish material, and more. This last magazine is full-sized but shares a pic or two with the last magazine and sports a very similar look. And with a title like Scandolls, well, it was just begging to meet my scanner.

Scandolls v01n01 (1959)(D&M)

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I probably won't be posting every one of these mags I do here on my blog, but for certain you can catch them at vintagegirliemags.com, and we welcome all there who'd care to share their magazines or just to discuss topics of interest regarding the mags, the girls, photographers and artists, the publishers, etc. I'm a few volumes into Dian Hansen's volumes of The History of Men's Magazines and have only recently begun collecting more of them, but I can safely say there are so, so many forgotten titles that deserve to see the light of the digital age. Scan em if you got em...

Next time on volunteer radio, a Mae West Number! I'm oh-so-close to beginning the series of posts on the birth of the girlie pulp I've been threatening forever, but I keep coming across items that I just have to have to include! (last it was a beautiful trio of La Vie Parisienne from the collection of Francis Smilby, now it's a curious little 1925 jazz mag called Hi-Jinks) In the meantime, we'll run with a post or few on varied subjects and magazines while I try and get my ducks in a row...

Vintage Girlie Magazines / The Land of Milk and Honey

Something a little different tonight. A parade of girlies. I usually keep it pretty toned-down on Darwination Scans, and I'm not ready to start posting scads of naked womens, but I feel like it's time I give the girlie magazines their due. There was a time not so far back when I wouldn't have considered scanning girlie magazines from prudishness and some ill-formed conceit that such material is not worthy of digitization, but just a cursory exploration of the girlie magazines of the 50s and 60s has cleared the fog. Many of the competitors of Playboy were very well done, and any cursory dismissal of the whole genre as mere smut ignores the fact that much excellent fiction was printed in these magazines and that the production of many of the hundreds of titles over the years was performed with utmost care. And before I go justifying or apologizing or whatever this foot-shuffling I'm engaging in is, smut has its charms, too.

But, really, in the age of XXX & internet porn, these magazines are downright quaint, a wholesome appreciation of the female form. Playboy and Penthouse these days don't seem much different to me than a Maxim or FHM. They are all glossy and polished with sanitary and conventional graphics layout and the magazine content is barely distinguishable from the advertising content. The girls tend to be stick-skinny and all reality-airbrushed from the whole thing and they are trying very much to keep the amplifier at 11. It's hard to call out the modern girlie magazines as being more objectified, but I can say unequivocally that I find the magazines from the 50s and 60s to be sweet and intimate, something you just cannot say about modern productions.

I probably won't be blogging that many of these, but I'd direct those with an interest in exploring the wide world of vintage girlie magazines to this site:

http://www.vintagegirliemags.com/

You won't find runs of Playboy or Penthouse here, but you will find a wide variety of gentleman's magazines from pulps to pockets to sweats through a wide variety of pin-up and nudie publications. I post regularly there and think the site has a lot of potential as a library and database of a whole variety of magazines. You can find any of these issues I'm posting tonight there with further detail as to contents as well as many other magazines from other scanners, so check it out. But onto the parade of magazines, you can click the issue title and number to go to the download link for each magazine. And before I forget my silent partner here, thanks to McCoy for the edit work on many of these issues. I'm sure he would agree with me that editing this type of magazine is a pleasure. Let's kick it off with a smokin' issue, I can almost feel the hellfire ;)

Sizzle v01n01 (1959.Spice)(DOM)

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Featuring Tura Santana of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! fame. Watch out, boys.

21 n04 (1956.Monogram)

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Featuring an article with a psychological approach to spanking with many panels from Eric Stanton's Madame Adista, illustrated fiction, burlesque ads, a neat article on the girlie pulps of the 20s and 30s (which makes a convincing argument that the mags from the 50s were no naughtier than their predecessors), poetry, cartoons, and more.

Beau v01n03 (1966-08.PDC)

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With features on Jayne, Alan King, Rolls-Royce, Will Bardot Be Another Monroe?, Sybil Burton and the Wild Ones, Ann Austin, rock climbing and more.

Jayne Mansfield for President (1964.Books, Inc.)

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Not exactly a girlie magazine exactly, but a novelty publication, and a nice companion to this last issue. The thriftstore-in-the-hood where I got it wanted way too much for this not-so-great copy, but I drove all the way back to the store to get it the next day after a sleepless night. I'm happy to have it now and to share the scan with you. I scanned it back during the election, and I still say Jayne for President.

Escapade v01v06 (1956-03.Dee) (McNation)

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This mag included illustrated fiction, articles, poetry as well as pictorials. There is a feature on Corliss Archer along with a few photos of Bettie Page taken by Bunny Yeager.

French Frills v02n02 (1962.American Art Agency)(D&M)

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An early-ish magazine from Milton Luros' American Art Agency that is now more commonly known under the Parliament banner (the company that distributed the magazines). The Parliament mags are still highly prized by collectors for the great girls and great photography.

And one last magazine, I'll have to get up the rest I'd planned on posting tonight tomorrow. Much yard work, two soccer games, two birthday parties, and two chocolate brownies have me ready to curl up in bed early with a paperback, so I'll finish up with another handful of these tomorrow.

Nugget v01n02 (1956-02.Nugget)

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I became interested in this magazine from my interest in Archer St. John's comics. Early in life he and his brother, Robert, tangled with Al Capone when they ran a small newspaper rallying against the mob. Before he died perhaps of a speed OD, the comics industry had started to falter,and Archer St. John had been putting a lot of effort into this stylish men's magazine and the classic crime magazine Manhunt. After his death, Archer's son stepped in to see this published. On the contents page there is even a reference that the magazine was founded by Archer. Running mostly literary reprints and photo shoots, this is a neat magazine with cool photos and illustrations. This a classy magazine, from when we could mix a little playful nudity in with literature and esoterica. Nugget is still around (um in a far naughtier form), but it has surely been bought and sold many times since back when.

More tomorrow!