Sunday 23 September 2012

Venus with a snake 13: drawing by Eugene Reunier




We haven't had a Venus with a snake for a while so here is a typically playful drawing by Eugene Reunier.  

Our young Venus (or is she an Eve?) reclines under an apple tree while its serpentine inhabitant slides down to flick its tongue into her inviting pussy.  This curious activity is being observed by a lurking lepidopterist.  The young lady appears to then enjoy the man's own snake as they play in their very own Eden.  Whether it is his dream, her dream or reality is not clear!



Friday 21 September 2012

Venus on the Cover: A Pubic Wars special - Part 2 the 1960s


July 1960


In this post we move on to the sixties in our review of the use of women on the cover of Playboy and Penthouse magazines (which wouldn't appear in the US until the end of the decade).  Mario Casilli's shot of some anonymous legs running across a beach for July 1960 provided a, still rare, location photo for the cover.


September 1960


By September the naked legs had been superseded by a naked back in Playboy's most assertive naked woman cover so far, cleverly presented as a jigsaw puzzle.  The model is Marli Renfro photographed by Don Bronstein.

Screech, screech,screech, screech!


Renfro, who was a Las Vegas showgirl and nude model, was famously the body double for Janet Leigh in the shower scene in Psycho the same year.  Janet Leigh wore a one piece swimsuit for her scenes so anything where you see a naked stomach is Renfro.


January 1961


After a two year gap the Playmate review gallery cover made a return, featuring another selection of dare to bare centrefold shots.  A couple of the originals of these did include some nipple but these were removed for the pictures on the cover.


July 1961


July had Playboy's first real lacy lingerie cover with Susie Scott, the February 1960 Playmate of the Month, showing a lot of skin through her short, black negligee.


March 1962


As more and more Playmates revealed their nipples in their centrefold pictures Playboy had to be more inventive in covering them up on its Playmate review covers.  Here they use the magazine's title to obscure June 1961's, Heide Becker's, prominent peaks.


June 1962


This abstracted picture by Marvin E Newman not only works because of the fine hips and stomach of the model but also because her bikini bottoms are slightly smaller than her revealed tan lines.  The tied side of the bikini bottoms are also suggestive of untying them to expose that hidden groin.  The cropping of the picture sexualises it in a way that showing the whole girl wouldn't.  A clever and enticing cover.  Playboy readers discovered that covering up the top half of the picture generated a much racier looking image.



December 1962


Sheralee Connars (Miss July 1961) isn't quite naked behind the fur but her top is not exactly substantial and is still sheer enough to demonstrate that she is not wearing any knickers.


December 1962


This is clearly demonstrated by the reverse shot inside the cover, which shows Miss Conners from behind.  Interestingly, the shots weren't done at different times, with Miss Conners turning around for the reverse picture, as you might expect.  Instead a u-shaped backdrop was circled around her, two apertures were cut in it for two camera lenses in front of and behind her (each hidden by her body) and the shots were made simultaneously.  Pompeo Posar and Bob Hart took the pictures and it took six hours and fifteen rolls of film to get right.


January 1963


January 1963's Playmate review gallery cover was a first, as both Avis Kimple (November 1963) at bottom left and Merle Pertile (february 1962) at top right both show a little glimpse of areola.  This was the first glimpse of nipple on the cover of Playboy.


March 1963


More skin on show on the cover of the March issue with Cynthia Maddox photographed by Don Bronstein.
This was the second of no less than five covers Maddox would do for Playboy.   Maddox was Hugh Hefner's main girlfriend from 1961 to 1963, having joined Playboy as a secretary in 1959 and ending up as assistant cartoon editor.  In the end, sick of Hefner's two timing, she walked out on him.  She wasn't a Playmate and this is as naked as she got for the magazine.


October 1963


A tantalising shot of Teddi Smith by Pompeo Posar appears to show her completely naked in the shower, although we suspect that she may have been wearing something or has been retouched later on.  Still, it is another example of a bold use of an apparently naked girl on the cover of the magazine. Smith was Miss July 1960 and would also go on to appear on the cover of the magazine five times, although one of these was on the January 1961 gallery shot with other Playmates so she doesn't quite match Cynthia Maddox.






The January 1964 edition had a continuation of the cover on the inside so that they could display the more, er, upfront, Playmates as part of their traditional gallery.  Prominent on the actual front cover was the centrefold for Terre Tucker (November 1963).  There had been some de-emphasising of her nipples but these were the first full-on, unobscured naked breasts on the cover of the magazine.




The March 1964 issue's cover wasn't particularly revealing but it was suggestive and included the first image of a girl on a bed to appear on the cover.   Czech actress Olga Schoberova's sultry sulkiness, as captured by Herman Leonard, just exudes a sexy rumpledness that matches the disarray of her sheets.  


Olga/Olinka in The Vengeance of She


Olga would later go on to be known as Olinka Berova and would be the star of the somewhat disappointing Hammer film sequel The Vengeance of She (1968) replacing Ursula Andress, from the original film, as she-who-must-be-obeyed.




January 1965's gallery cover was unusual in that although it featured pictures of the previous year's Playmates it did not use their centrefold shots.  A lot of cleavage on show in this one and more than a hint of nipple on the third picture down on the left.




The rest of the 1965 covers were mainly of portraits or fully clothed girls, with only Lannie Balcom, who would become Playmate of the Month in August that year, showing any skin.  Another one of those Playmates who died before her time, in 1991 at the age of fifty of a drug overdose.








The  January 1966 issue played around with the usual gallery cover idea and had just the one visible picture. where September 1965's Patti Reynolds' pert breast was visible in profile through a cut-out in the front cover.  Inside the pictures had reverted to the usual reproductions of the centrefolds.  The other covers for that year were probably even more modest than for 1965.






For January 1967 Playboy persisted with its flat rabbit and Playmates in picture frames approach. At least this time the picture frames were appropriate as they had commissioned some artists to "interpret the Playboy Playmate" and one of these pictures was on the cover. The other three frames were occupied by some of the previous year's Playmates. For the first time, all of them, however, were defiantly topless and clearly displaying their nipples without them having been touched up, so to speak. No wonder the rabbit looked even smugger than usual although he had been virtually pushed off the side of the cover to give full prominence (and that is certainly the word for Melinda Windsor bottom right) to the Playmates' charms.  The rest of the rabbit appeared on the inside cover.  This was a very bold step for Playboy.  There main rival, Cavalier, was largely featuring just portraits of women on its cover and had had nothing as racy as this.




The rest of 1967's covers were very conservative and it wasn't until the Playmate Review cover came around again  a year later that we got to see more nipples on the cover of the magazine.


Sharon's back


In March 1968 Playboy's cover had another naked girl from behind.  In this shot of Sharon Christie by David Chan she is just showing the very top of her bottom; revealing an inch or so more than Marli Renfro had in September 1960.  This was Chan's first cover for Playboy.  Over the next ten years he would do five more and shoot eight Playmates.


Sharon's front


For January 1969 Playboy eschewed the usual gallery cover for a plain white one with the rabbit head logo embossed on it.  The next naked girl on the cover was Sharon Kristie again, for April 1969.  This time she is viewed from the front and shot by Pompeo Posar in one of the most effective girl-only cover pictures of the sixties.  Sharon is clearly revealing some of her right areola here for the first time on a full-size Playboy cover photo




Playboy copied this cover for their August 2010 issue which featured Mad Men's Crista Flanagan although she is not able to show as much.  The two covers demonstrate the superiority of the sixties small text compared with today's overpowering approach.




September 1969 saw another slightly racy cover with that month's centrefold Shay Knuth lifting her shirt to show the underside of her naked breast.  This area was considered particularly racy in the US for some reason.  Bill Theiss, the costume designer for Star Trek, earlier in the decade, had been told that although plunging cleavage was acceptable, he must never show the underside of a woman's breast on one of his costumes on TV.  Was this slightly racier than usual cover anything to do with the arrival on the newsstands of Bob Guccione's Penthouse that month?


September 1969. First US Penthouse


Crossing the Atlantic from Britain, where it had been on sale since 1965, Penthouse's first US cover featured Pet of the Month Evelyn Treacher in an enticingly see-through dress.  Her breast is veiled, certainly, but it's assertive profile put an immediate marker down to Playboy.




By November Penthouse was displaying The Sun's first Page 3 girl, Ulla Lindstrom's chest even more thinly veiled, with a hint of just visible nipples on display.

Next time we will see how this cover battle developed in the seventies.

Thursday 20 September 2012

4 million page views!



At some point in the last few days we passed 4 million page views which means that the last half a million took just two months and ten days or so to clock up.  

These milestones always give us an excuse to post a one-off picture which we have been sitting on.  This one is an image from, we suspect, the early thirties (or possibly the late twenties).  Unusually for these sorts of French photographs it contains the name of the photographer Hilde Meyer Kupfer (we have seen it written as Kupfer-Meyer in a book on German naturism).  It is not, as some sites will have it, the name of the lovely model and the photographer's name may well be a pseudonym so that she may or may not be a woman.  If she was a woman that would have been quite unusual in this period.  The AN on the bottom left of the picture stands for the Alfred Noyer studio in Paris which published many nude postcards as well as conventional subjects.




Here is another picture with the same inscription and it looks very much like the same girl.  

Saturday 15 September 2012

Venus enlarged...bigger is better!



For some time we have been irritated by the small size of the images on our blogs so have decided to change templates to allow for the posting of larger pictures such as this.

We had a comment to the effect that the ultimate Playboy Playmate had to be Marilyn Lange from May 1974 so what better way to celebrate our bigger images than an image of a very big girl.

Friday 14 September 2012

Venus in a Vest 3: Anna Noble




Here are some splendid photographs of Anna Noble in a vest taken as a part of a shoot that appeared in Mayfair magazine in 1975.




Close observation shows that her garment is actually a very pale shade of pink rather than the more classic white but that does in no way detract from its pleasing visual effect.




The remarkable thing about these pictures is that they show Anna with a totally untrimmed bush which, even for 1975, was somewhat unusual.  Obviously not shot at a bikini time of year her pubic hair runs right up to her belly button in an enticing trail.






Triple P prefers his women in vests to just wear a vest but in this case we really cannot object to a pair of black hold-up stockings as well.




We can't find any information on the lovely Miss Noble other than she started modelling for the Daily Mirror's equivalent of Page 3 in 1976.  She never appeared in The Sun and disappeared from he modelling scene at the end of the seventies.  


Anna in The Spy Who Loved Me title sequence


Mayfair ran a second pictorial of her in 1977 to tie in with her very brief appearance in the title sequence of the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.






Looking at this picture she has a fine coating of hairs down her thighs as well but as they are blonde they hardly show.  What delightfully furry girl she is!





Anna's bust is such, of course, that if you push her vest up to reveal it the garment has enough to rest on so it doesn't fall straight down again.

Monday 10 September 2012

Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars 9 1977 part 4



After the pussy-packed July edition of Playboy, August's issue was much less explicit, although the cover had a nicely enticing shot by Phillip Dixon of December 1971's Playmate Karen Christie.  Christie, a former girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, had got fed up with his two-timing and moved back to Texas where, at this point in time, she was working as a fashion model in Dallas.


McGuire, Olson and Russell in the rapids


The first pictorial in the issue was one of those typical Playboy "adventure" ones where a group of girls and some random men sail, swim, camp etc.  This one was photographed in the Grand Canyon and featured Playmate of the Year Patti Mcguire, Hope Olson (October 1976) and a Bunny Girl from Chicago, Cindy Russell.  Never shy about spreading her legs it was McGuire who flashed her bits at Richard Fegley's lens, however.


Julia Lyndon


Playmate of the Month, the statuesque (36-23-32!)  Julia Lyndon, displayed her bits as well in this black and white shot.  Julia was far more than another dumb model (one of her favourite composers was listed as Respighi, which indicates very fine taste!) and was compiling a  yellow pages of trendy shops and restaurants in San Francisco at the time of her pictorial.  Julia came from a wealthy family and her father was president of a plastics corporation in Akron, Ohio.  Her sister is actress Sydne Rome, which Playboy was not aware of at the time of her shoot.  When last heard of Julia was running a restaurant in South America.




Next came a long pictorial on the film Madame Claude (1976) directed by Just Jaeckin, the director of Emmanuelle (1974).  Playboy were obviously expecting it to be the new Emmanuelle but it wasn't, probably because the convoluted political plot got in the way of the soft core sex. This tastefully orgiastic picture shows that Playboy hadn't entirely backed off on the lesbian theme, as their advertisers had wanted.


Lenka Novak


Finally, we had the result of Playboy's Playmate photo contest; the winning shot, by Dan Kupersmith, being of 20 year old Lenka Novak.  Novak went on to have a brief career in exploitation films appearing in such classics as Vampire Hookers (1978), The Great American Girl Robbery (1979) and Coach (1978); one of two films where she played a cheerleader.  The biggest film she appeared in was the early John Landis helmed, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, episodic comedy Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), where she had a role in the Catholic High School Girls in Trouble segment.  We'll see her again as she made the cover of Oui in December 1978.




Lenka, under the name Olivia Elliott, had been the Pet of the Month in the UK edition of Penthouse in November 1973.  This was the first time that the UK edition used a Pet who didn't appear in the US version.  She appeared in many other magazines in the UK, USA and Europe as well.





The venerable Cavalier was jumping firmly into the fashion for lesbian pictorials by this time and their August effort, Twofers, had quite a lot of pussy on show, including this naughtily effective finger-framed one.  The accompanying text, however, as was often the case in magazines featuring girl/girl sets, refers to them both having boyfriends to show that they aren't lesbians really.




The Larry Flynt published Chic continued with its distinctive large format pages and a minimum of one photo per page, often having one picture across two pages.  Inside, elegant European-looking women (the kind you would expect to find in Oui) spread their legs and showed everything.




In the August issue we have this study of a young lady diddling herself with the heel of her boudoir-style slipper.  Obviously  a lady who really loves shoes but a demonstration of how Chic was successfully mixing explicit raunch with top production values.


Jocelyne's cunt from Chic


Yaffa's cunt from Chic


Chic was also using full page close ups of the girls genitals in a way that the other magazines were not at this point.  They presented them as a thing of sexual beauty in their own right without the issue of distracting breasts and faces.  Flynt had successfully objectified the cunt making the woman almost irrelevant.  Not the sort of approach that Hugh Hefner would have approved of, let alone feminists!




Larry Flynt was well aware of the effect of his genitally-focussed pictures as this amusing advertisement from  the same year demonstrates.




August's Oui had it's fair share of carefully lit labia but was becoming increasingly soft-focus in many of its pictorials, enabling it to be more explicit than Playboy once more but still tasteful.  They managed to not go the way of Penthouse and, especially, Hustler, where the genitals became the entire focus of the pictures   and kept the revealing of this part of the anatomy almost incidental.  Unlike Playboy and Penthouse, however, it kept the bared nipples on the cover.




The issue of how to keep all that unruly seventies fluff nice and neat is solved with this fine photograph by Frank Gitty of a lady known as "Tequila" giving herself a comb.




Miranda, in the same issue, flashes her labia quite a lot in a very Penthouse soft-focus sort of way.  Here she also indulges in some equally Penthouse -style faux masturbation.  This is the sort of shot that Playboy was now eschewing meaning that Oui was, once more, the more visually explicit of the two stablemates.




Oddly, Oui's couples pictorials were now less explicit than they had been previously but this fine set featured some good implied copulation in a train carriage.  Unlike previous couples pictorials in Oui there are no visible penis or labia shots.  On the other hand many of the couples pictorials in the other magazines had the couples caressing each other but didn't put them in such aggressive sex positions.  Here, however, the lovely English model Felicity Buirski appears to be getting a good seeing to.  This pictorial was shot by Jeff Dunas at Horsted Keynes station on the famous Bluebell Line heritage steam railway in Sussex, England.




The August Penthouse had its normal four pictorials but it was the cover that caused a stir depicting, as it did Margaret Stockton draped in the American flag.  "I am writing to express my strong objection to your misuse of our country's flag on the cover of the August edition of Penthouse", wrote LS from California in the November issue. "I find your August cover entirely inappropriate, to say the very least about it" ,added Michael Fisher, a US Army policeman. AK of Chicago said, "I, as an America, was appalled by the cover of the August issue..."  Oh dear!  Penthouse did not respond but at least they printed the letters.


Rebecca Davenport/Deanna Baker


A rare treat was in store for those Playboy aficionados who wondered what the girl next door had between her legs (if Patti McGuire hadn't already shown it to them) in the elegant shape of Rebecca Davenport.  Miss Davenport was, in fact, Playboy Playmate of the Month for May 1972, Deanna Baker.  You can see both her full pictorials here.  Twenty-seven year old Deanna was the first Playboy Playmate to appear in Penthouse.



The Pet of the Month, Barbara Corser also, oddly, had a link to Playboy as well.  We particularly like this shot of her by Earl Miller as her pussy revealing pose is almost (but not quite) justifiable given that she is taking off her stocking.  1977, as we have seen, saw the girls' genitals starting to take centre stage (a situation that remains to this day). Initially the situation was about not concealing them or retouching them out if they happened to be revealed by a particular pose; something that gave a nice peek-a-boo surprise element if a glimpse of labia appeared.  Now, however, the girls bits were being positively displayed as the main focus of many the pictures. What a lovely display Mr Miller gets from the elegant Barbara here, however.  Lost in her own typically Penthouse reverie it's almost as if she doesn't know she is flashing her bits.




Barbara was born in Munich, Bavaria, and had appeared on the cover of Oui back in October 1975 in a splendid shot of her perched on a bannister.




Before that, however, she had been the Playmate of the Month in Playboy's German edition where her 36-26-35 figure was perfectly displayed in her centrefold for July 1975.




Penthouse's third dark haired girl that month was Jasmine Elliott whose splendid black bush couldn't quite hide her splendidly pink clitoris.


Anna Noble in August 1977 Penthouse


The final pictorial was on the girls of the new James Bond film The Spy who Loved Me (1977).  Although Triple P prefers Sean Connery's Bond this particular example of the Roger Moore canon has the most resonance for Triple P.  It was the first Bond we went to see without our family.  In fact, we took a lovely girl, A, who we had met at our archery club.  She certainly qualifies as Triple P's first girlfriend and although we didn't go anything like "all the way" (as it was excitedly referred to at school) with her she was something of a tease and there was certainly some mutual caressing of (clothed) nether regions during the course of watching this film one afternoon at the cinema. It was the first time we discovered that girls got hot and damp down there when they got excited.  Certainly exciting was the girl who featured in more than one picture in this pictorial on Bond girls, the ravishing Anna Noble.


Anna as Mayfair centrefold girl in May 1975


Noble was a very active glamour girl in the mid seventies, appearing in Mayfair, Men Only, Fiesta, Knave, Club International, Game and many others as well as continental magazines.  Noble's inclusion in the Bond girls article was a bit of a cheat as she only appeared as one of the "silhouette" girls in the title sequence, rather than the main film itself, but who would want to miss out on such a fine study of her with a banana?


Anna in Men Only July 1975


Anna had a completely awesome bush and also one of those neat pussies that don't reveal her bits so however much she spread her legs she revealed nothing.  Most of her pictorials appeared in 1975 and we wonder whether these factors effected her ability to get work in the genital-displaying period afterwards.



The splendidly bushy Anna Noble


She appeared under a number of different names including: Anna Esquivel, Elena Royale, Diane Amanti, Caroline, Sonia, Rachel and Veronique.  These shots of her (from Mayfair in 1975) are interesting as they show a completely untrimmed bush with an enticing trail of hairs leading right up to her belly button and fluff down her inner thighs.  These days this sort of display would only appear in specialist magazines and would provoke horror amongst the younger generation.  We have to say that we find it quite sexy, however!






The image which Triple P remembers Miss Noble for the most, however, is her appearance on the cover of this record in a striking blue dress.  We well remember seeing this on the shelves of WH Smiths, where it always seemed to be prominently displayed.




Playboy's September cover highlighted one of their regular pictorials on college girls from across America.  The big ten is one of America's athletic conferences; organised so that different universities can compete against their regional local peers.  The Big Ten covers the mid-west including Illinois which was, of course, Playboy's home state.




Before we get to the students, however, there is the little matter of September's Playmate, the spectacularly tressed Debra Jo Fondren, to deal with. Shot by Robert Scott Hooper, in the first of his two Playmate centrefolds, he gets Debra Jo to flash her bits in this cheekily revealing shot.




For a magazine which had promised its advertisers that it would be much less explicit there is a lot of pussy on display in the Big 10 student pictorial.  Nicholas de Sciose often produced some of the more radical shots for Playboy and this one of Cynthia Benedict's sumptuous rear end is no exception.




In this shot by David Chan of Gail Palmer her wispy stocking does little to conceal what's between her legs.




Sciose's photo of Tobi Lee has her finger probing her labia in a strongly auto-erotic shot.  Not a very girl-next-door pose this, considering she was a student and not a professional model. This picture would still have been very at home in Penthouse at the time.  Whether this naughtiness was an attempt to hold the slide in the financial fortunes of Playboy is a matter for discussion.  The Pubic Wars had hit Playboy badly as regards circulation and although that was only part of the malaise in the organisation, that month Playboy President Derick Daniels would sack 70 of Playboy's staff in an attempt to contain costs.





Across at Gallery, which had gradually been getting more and more explicit, they had this young lady in a similarly pussy touching pose.




Larry Flynt's Chic continued to offer up barrier pushing explicit pictorials using top models and top photographers.




For their September issue they had their centrefold feature shot by a young up and coming photographer called Arny Freytag  Shortly afterwards he would move across to Playboy, getting his first Playboy cover for December 1977 and his first solo Playboy centrefold credit for December 1978.  He would eventually shoot more Playboy centrefolds than anyone else.  This picture of Georgia ignores the eyes that were considered so important at Playboy relying on a naughty-looking tongue and the tactile effect of droplets of water on her face and sand on her breasts for its (successful) erotic charge.




Freytag's centrefold for Chic demonstrates his characteristically complex lighting (he would sometimes use as many as fifty separate lights on his Playboy centrefolds).  Georgia's twisted body profiles her very perky nipples and the towel and cropping on the right of the photo effectively remove her arms and legs from the picture leaving just her head and torso as the centre of attention, like an X-rated Venus de Milo.  The picture is composed in thirds to match the three pages of the gatefold: face in the first section, then breasts then anus and genitals  Each section would work as a study on its own.  It is an interesting example of what a Playboy photographer could do given no restrictions as to what could be shown.




September was always the "special anniversary issue" for Penthouse in the US and this was their eighth birthday.  They celebrated in the editorial trumpeting that they had overtaken Playboy's circulation to become the biggest selling men's magazine in the world.  They couldn't resist a swipe at their rivals saying, "Penthouse embraced the concept of a maturing, liberated society that saw women as less than plastic perfect, that watched Playboy's perennial girl-next-door grow up and acquire honest-to-goodness, real-life fuckability....Penthouse threw away the airbrush (and) provided sex without the lectures (no doubt a reference to Hugh Hefner's Playboy Philosophy series).  They also promised a "Stimulating array of September sirens" and they certainly delivered on that promise.




First off, Penthouse presented another girl/girl set; the first for some months.  Called Pas-de-Deux it was photographed by Earl Miller. The accompanying text was an extract from Pierre LouΓΏs' The Songs of Bilitis so didn't reference the models at all.  A sexy and successful pictorial the two girls were originally dressed as ballet dancers and convincingly indulged in some passionate caressing.  There were a notable number of faux cunnilingus shots in this one, although on closer examination the tongue isn't exactly where you might imagine.


Up the skirt with Lucia


September's Pet of the Month was Lucia St Angelo a really very beautiful girl from Rome (according to Penthouse, anyway).   Photographed by Dieter Schmidt (in the first of his Penthouse shoots) the vast majority of the pictures in her pictorial are what would now be called "upskirt" pictures and very erotic they are too.  One of Penthouse's most elegant, sexy and effective Pet pictorials for some time.




The final one of "September's sirens" was  a rare ethnic model for Penthouse, Diana Rose Hardy  photographed by Enrique.  Penthouse here gives us its wettest looking pussy so far as it ups the ante in its battle with Hustler and its clones.




Diana's ecstatic looking masturbation photographs look to be the closest to the real thing in the magazine so far.  One finger on her clitoris and another probing at her vaginal entrance it was Penthouse's ultimate visual expression of female self-love to date.  Nether this one, nor the one above, appeared in the UK version of the magazine, it must be said.


Diana in her blonde phase in the early eighties


Diana Rose Hardy posed for other magazines such as Hustler and High Society in the late seventies and early eighties by which time she had, somewhat bizarrely given her Asian looks, died her hair an unconvincing blonde colour.  We prefer her with black hair.




Speaking of Hustler, at this time they came out with the first edition of what Playboy would later call a "newsstand special" called Hustler Rejects. By then the third highest circulation men's magazine they claimed that after three years they had "accumulated a backlog of near-Honeys who've never appeared in the magazine".  



Alex by Suze Randall


These women, they claimed, did not meet publisher Larry Flynt's high standards but "even our rejects are better than 99% of the women you'll see in most other men's magazines."  The introduction to this publication went on to say that the reason's for a photo set being rejected were usually not to do with the attractiveness of the women although they admitted that "some unattractive women had been shot in the hope that we'd get some usable shots."



The rumpled looking Sparky


Instead, a list of other problematic issues to do with bad sets, problem costumes, sunburnt models etc. were rolled out.  One of the girls in the magazine, Sparky, shot by Clive McLean, had her pictures rejected because "her rumpled jumpsuit detracted from her erotic contortionist poses".  Frankly, we don't think that anything can detract from her erotic contortionist poses.


Sara by Bob Veze


"If you know what to expect from Hustler you'll know what to expect from Hustler Rejects," concluded the introduction before taking a last swipe at the competition:  "No Vaseline-smeared lenses or airbrushed women - just the hottest and most accessible girls in the world."



Janet by Diana Hardy


If by "accessible" they meant girls displaying their increasingly wet-looking cunts then that certainly summed up the content of the magazine.  This damp damsel was photographed by Diana Hardy.  She is the very same Diana Rose Hardy that posed in that month's Penthouse (above).  She was only a part time model and was more often to be found behind the scenes working as a make-up artist, set designer and wardrobe stylist before becoming a successful photographer in her own right.   She died in 2008.




Interestingly, compared with later editions, there were no girl/girl or couples sets in this.  There were increasing numbers of pictures of girls parting their own labia to display their pinkness but not so many shots of anuses (compared with Chic, for example); this one of Bucky by Bob Veze being a rare exception.  By the following year's issue much of this would have changed as we shall see in the future.

Next time we will look at the last quarter of 1977.