History of Men's Magazines (Dian Hanson's: The History of Men's Magazine) Vol.2 [Hardcover]

Dian Hanson (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2004

Open your notebooks, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for a history lesson like none you've ever experienced. Yes, that's right: you're about to learn everything you could ever want to know about the world history of men's magazines -- not sports, not fashion, not hunting or fishing or how to build a birdhouse in ten easy steps, but those titillating periodicals embracing the subject dearest to all heterosexual men's hearts and other organs: the undraped female form. A twenty-five-year veteran of the genre, former men's magazine editor Dian Hanson traces its development from 1900 to 1980 in six massive and informative volumes. Volume II starts in the post-war period of the 1940s when the US surged ahead in magazine production while the rest of the world rebuilt and recovered, and ends in 1957 when censorship at last began to ease.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 460 pages
• Publisher: Taschen (November 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3822826251
• ISBN-13: 978-3822826256
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #865,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dian Hanson was born in Seattle, Washington, November 2, 1951. A hippie and high school drop out, she moved east at age 20, first to Oxford, Mississippi, then Allentown, Pennsylvania, finally settling in New York City in 1976 to work on the sex magazine Puritan. Over the next 25 years she edited magazines including Partner, Oui, Adult Cinema Review, Harvey, Hooker, Juggs and Leg Show. She founded the magazines Outlaw Biker, Hawgs, Big Butt, Bust Out and Tight. In 1993 Hanson became friends with Benedikt Taschen, and in 2001 she finally agreed to leave sex magazines and take over the Sexy Book division of TASCHEN Publishing. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the novelist Geoff Nicholson.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The sort men like, November 26, 2004

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: History of Men's Magazines (Dian Hanson's: The History of Men's Magazine) Vol.2 (Hardcover)

I can't think of another publisher, other than Taschen, who would risk publishing a six-volume, extravagantly produced history of men's magazines and who better than Dian Hanson to write it. She has had plenty of experience in this section of the magazine trade.

This volume covers the fourteen years from 1945 and really it is not too interesting until Hefner starts Playboy in 1953. Until then the market was basically down-market cheesecake and burlesque oriented magazines though there are chapters devoted to John Willie's 'Bizarre' and Lenny Burtman's 'Exotique' but these were hardly mass-market titles. Chapter three, nicely, features titles from Argentina and Mexico and chapter six covers England. Playboy was the title that makes this history interesting, unique when it first came out but not for long, titles like Nugget, The Dude, Swank, Rogue and others made this genre of publishing sort of respectable.

The seventeen chapters follow the same format, a few hundred words of copy and then pages and pages of covers and spreads from the various titles. Chapter sixteen features the Top 5 Cover girls, Diane Webber, June Wilkinson, Jayne Mansfield, Bettie Page and predictably Marilyn as number one. Chapter seventeen is a neat finale, devoted to the tacky ads that appeared in the back of many men's titles. Major advertisers totally shunned most of this market for obvious reasons.

Fascinating though the book is I do have a major disappointment (so four stars) and that is the paper, a matt stock that soaks up the ink so that none of the covers sparkle. I've bought several other pop culture Taschen books this year and they have all had semi gloss stock that reproduces covers and illustrations so well. There are a few hundred color covers in 'The History of Men's Magazines' and frequently the whole page ones look soft and grainy, they are, after all, reproduced from something already printed, a different paper would have mostly avoided this. Another slight annoyance is the three-language text (English, French and German) all set in the same typeface so at the end of a column one naturally goes to the next column and it is German. To my mind it would have been preferable to run each language in its own text block.

Apart from the paper I thought the book was well worth having and if you

read the Product Description you'll see what the other five volumes cover.

When complete I think this will become the definitive work about this

corner of the publishing world. I'm already making shelf-room for the set.