Taschen's 'Pin-Up Girls' books
1000 Pin-Up Girls
Pin-Ups (Icons) [BELOW THE LINE]
The Best Of American Girlie Magazines [BELOW THE LINE]
(1997 - Taschen)

(edited by Burkhard Riemschneider) This is the best of this trio of editions focused completely on Robert Harrison's girlie magazines of the 1940s & 50s; Beauty Parade, Eyeful, Titter, Wink, Whisper and Flirt. THE BEST OF AMERICAN GIRLIE MAGAZINES could be considered the 'base' edition (while huge, still not completely comprehensive in gathering the cover art), with this and the other one being smaller subsets of it. The paper stock used here is far superior to that in the 'original' edition. At this 'digest' size, this collection is nearly twice as thick as the ideal. There are 314 pages that aren't the painted art. 13 of those are English text and about that many again for that same text in German and French. Almost all of the rest of those non-art pages are reproductions of what could be found behind the painted covers, namely bikini & lingerie clad girls in innumerable black-&-white photo-essays, gag shots and cheesecake. The 260 painted covers, with their typography, which are reproduced as full-bleed (but with about a quarter-inch cropped off each edge), break down like this: Billy DeVorss (20), Peter Driben (196)*, Merlin Enabnit (3) and Earl Steffa Moran (4), and since the magazines reused the art on other covers, this book also displays 37 of those duplicates. None of the reproduced covers are captioned or identified, but most signatures can be made out (and there are websites that index these magazine covers and do their best to identify each of the artists). (It should be mentioned that THE GREAT AMERICAN PIN-UP has reproduced the original paintings (without the typography) of 36 of the Driben covers found here and 3 of the ones from DeVorss.)

* - Note that 122 of Driben's pieces here do appear 'well-presented' in his own collection up on The List.

[-BELOW THE LINE-] At 194 pages, this book is a much smaller subset of THE BEST OF AMERICAN GIRLIE MAGAZINES, but do know that it does have some material not found in the larger subset, 1000 PIN-UP GIRLS, including a couple of reprinted pages of John Willie's sequential art and three Earl Moran covers and one cover each from Peter Driben and Enoch Bolles. It falls 'below the line' because the final count of covers versus the non-art pages is too small a portion of the book. It is also presented on better paper stock than the huge 'base' edition, but it chooses to not include any examples of Whisper magazine. Anyway, this thinner book is also digest size with the condensed introduction presented in German and French as well, and the non-captioned full-bleed cover reproductions have the same quarter-inch cropped off each edge. The artists well-presented here are: Enoch Bolles, Billy DeVorss (5), Peter Driben (53), Merlin Enabnit, Earl Steffa Moran (4).

[-BELOW THE LINE-] This book does not make up onto The List by a long shot. The edition that I judged was best was 1000 PIN-UP GIRLS and it's twice as thick than what's ideal. This book is a third again as thick ! And with all that increased material, it only displays 20 additional painted covers (and five additional duplicates). The paper isn't much above pulp, but I guess the original magazines were about the same. The text commentary pages don't appear to be anything more that what you will find in 1000 PIN-UP GIRLS. And the same quarter-inch is missing from each edge of these reproductions. Anyway, among the over-700 pages, the artist breakdown looks like this: Enoch Bolles, Billy DeVorss (22), Peter Driben (208)*, Merlin Enabnit (3), Earl Steffa Moran (8) and Winer.