ON THE RACK
A PERSONAL PULP HISTORY
by Tom Brinkmann
Magazines have only been around for a relatively short period of time, roughly 336 years if we start their timeline with what is considered to be the first periodical, the French Journal des scavans. The first to actually use the word “magazine”––in the sense of a periodical for entertainment––was reportedly the English monthly Gentleman’s Magazine (“The magazine began publication with the January 1731 issue. Over time the magazine had various subtitles, including ‘monthly intelligencer’ and ‘historical review’. It restarted its volume numbering in 1868. It ceased publication in 1907”). How these early magazines were distributed, I can only guess –– hawked on street corners, probably.
So the newsstands evolved to shelter the early dealers of pulp from the elements. And what of the little bundles of joy themselves? The magazines? Sold to the public; never to be nestled together again in the same space and time; scattered to the wind like pollen or seed, disseminated bits of information, gossip, humor and news.
My memory entered the timeline of magazines in 1960 in New Hampshire. I was five-years-old, sitting in my grandfather’s library looking at 1940s and ‘50s issues of the National Geographic Magazine. Not able to read much yet, I was fascinated by the photos and paintings, which would mesmerize me for hours. A few years down the line I had graduated to such things as Highlights and Boy’s Life, to which I subscribed, courtesy of my parents.
The first pulp rack I found myself attracted to was the comic book rack at the local mom & pop grocery store. For some reason, they only carried comics with painted covers; all the Gold Key, Dell and Classics Illustrated titles. Since the Comics Code Authority had started in 1955, the year I was born, by the time I started buying comics in 1962 (Dell’s KONA Monarch of Monster Isle #3 being my first comic book), they had long since been “cleaned up” and watered down.
In search of other comics, not sold at the local mom & pop store, by such publishers as DC, and the newly formed Marvel, lead me to other sections of town and other, more exotic, sleazy, and well stocked magazine racks –– with such eye candy as The Police Gazette, National Enquirer, Candid Press, Evergreen Review, etc.
Mad, the kid’s bible back then, was of major fascination to me, but because good ol’ mom had seen a copy once and found something inside she considered too racy, I wasn’t allowed to bring Mad into the house. This of course didn’t prevent me from reading it, thanks to friends and their older brothers.
In the summer of ‘65 I turned ten, and the ban on Mad was lifted (after much bellyaching from me) and the floodgates of magazine awareness were opened for me. The first issue of Mad I bought was #96. About a year later, when visiting relatives in New York, mom and I went into the city for the day and stopped at the offices of Mad magazine, located on Madison Avenue. The halls were lined with original cover paintings by Kelly Freas and Norman Mingo! Being shown around by the janitor, I saw the art department and peeked into a few of the offices, and was given a couple of the Alfred E. Neuman giveaway records “It’s A Gas” and “She Let’s Me Watch Her Mom & Pop Fight”. In the elevator on the way out, we found ourselves with someone who spoke with a heavy foreign accent, and during the conversation he informed us he was the artist who drew the "Spy vs. Spy" strip for Mad! I didn’t know his name at the time, because he always signed the strip in Morse Code.
I eventually subscribed to Mad and continued to buy it for the next eight years, along with the paperback reprints of the earlier issues.
The first monster mag I bought was Famous Monsters of Filmland #34 August ‘65 issue, which had a painting of Fredrick March’s version of Mr. Hyde on its cover. Famous Monsters was then one of the mags that I bought regularly, along with its sister illustrated horror titles Creepy, Eerie and Vampirilla, and various other titles of the same concern from Eerie Publications and Skywald. Castle of Frankenstein was another mag I had heard about but never seen, until I found a copy of issue #15 at a newly discovered lunch counter’s mag rack. Then I rounded up all the back issues I could find. CofF was a great little low level monster movie mag which also had ads for, and reviews of, underground comix and fanzines. All these titles I kept up with, until sometime in the early Seventies, when I stopped buying such things in favor of concentrating on underground comix and newspapers.
Other mags, that fascinated me then were the Pro-Wrestling mags that regularly featured gory covers of blood covered wrestlers, which they still do. UFO mags and men’s mags such as Argosy and True, also got a solid grip on my adolescent imagination, as they always had articles on strange science back then (the Loch Ness Monster, Bermuda Triangle, Big Foot, Ancient Astronauts, etc.).
I discovered Playboy sometime in the sixties –– again with a little help from friends and their older brothers. And on occasion we would raid parent’s drawers for adult pulp goodies. In 1967, during the “Summer of Love”, one of my friends’ parents went on vacation to San Francisco and took a bus tour of the Haight-Ashbury district to see the hippies (who had become a tourist attraction, much to their dismay and amusement, I would guess). They bought some souvenirs, including “hippie sex newspapers”. We found a copy of the Haight-Ashbury Free Press (v1 #7, 1967) in their bedroom together with a couple of booklets of male beefcake photos!?! Needless to say, we got endless snickers and giggles from all of these little artifacts.
One day, while doing who knows what at the age of thirteen, in the summer of 1968, I stumbled upon the motherlode of all magazine racks! In the middle of town (Concord, NH) was a store called Super X (no kidding), which primarily sold all the things you would find in a pharmacy, except for the prescription goods. Once you got past the front counter and made a left, the magazine rack was staring you in the face. A mass of colors, pictures, titles, blurbs and grabbers from the floor upwards, it ran the whole length of the aisle to the back of the store, where it ended in a small jungle of turn-style racks for paperbacks. It seemed as if every magazine published was on this rack, stuff I didn’t even know existed. The scales had fallen from my pulp searching eyes! Every sleazy men’s adventure magazine was there, alongside detective, girlie, sex humor, UFO, horror, monster, juvenile humor, crime, wrestling, war stories, hot rod mags, and tabloids of the most questionable sort. All resided together on that one wall. I would spend countless hours and dollars there during the next four or five years, trying to avoid the eyes of the dark-haired, cigar chomping, swarthy looking sentinel behind the front counter, and the mirror that overlooked the magazine aisle in which he could see everything.
It was from this rack at Super X that I first discovered the Evergreen Review. Lured by the blonde beauty on the cover, Evergreen #55 June ‘68 opened up a new world, hipper than Playboy and far more underground as far as content went. But it was the article on Bonnie & Clyde that I bought it for –– a small fad that year on account of the movie which had stirred up controversy due to its explicit violence. The killers became resurrected folk heroes overnight. I was completely infected with the B&C bug having gotten in to see the film against my parents wishes and despite the age restriction. I bought all the related paperbacks, crime magazines (Crime Does Not Pay and Crime and Punishment were the two crime titles that I sought the most, also from Super X), and the soundtrack album!
Esquire was another magazine that interested me at an early age. It always had very clever and topical covers, Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastian, as well as the in depth articles by well known writers. So I was a fashionable subscriber in 1968-’69.
In 1969, I saw for the first time several strange little otherworldly comics at a friend-of-a-friend’s house, and was entranced by the colorful covers, bizarre graphics and pants pissing hilarity. These were Bijou Comix #2 and #3, and Zap Comix #1 and #2 –– one of which was drawn by “that guy that did the Cheap Thrills album cover” R. Crumb. It was no wonder then, when I first saw the title Headcomix staring up at me from a bookstore table, I immediately recognized the artist as R. Crumb and bought it.
Head shops started popping up here and there by 1970, containing new racks and shelves to scour. My friends and I made pilgrimages to college towns to find little hole-in-the-wall head shops with their handfuls of comix and underground newspapers. A couple of early comix I found were San Francisco Comics #1 with a great wrap-around cover by Rory Hayes, which I found at a head shop called Xanadu in Hampton Beach, NH (they had a bunch of comix on a shelf that you had to dig through while inhaling incense, that could still be detected when sniffing the comix years later), and Yellow Dog #9/10, that I bought at a head shop named Bull Durham, in Durham, NH.
Then, in the December 1970 issue of Playboy there was an article on the phenomena of underground comix, which put them into historical perspective and legitimized them in my mind as something to be avidly collected. I then got the addresses of places I could buy them through the mail, thereby filling holes in my collection. Even at that early date some comix were out of print and hard to find.
Rock magazines were another staple of my pulp diet, starting with mags like Teenset and Circus (which had been Hullabaloo), and then getting older and hipper with the likes of Creem, Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone. But things really got interesting to me in the seventies with Rock Scene, The New York Rocker and Punk magazine. Rock Scene was an amazing little mag at the time, even though the insides were printed on newsprint, and was first to cover the burgeoning scene at CBGBs. Rock Scene was also the only American rock magazine to put the New York Dolls on one of their covers (March 1974).
One of the stranger magazines, that wasn’t really a “rock music” mag, but was –– we were to believe –– written by, and for, groupies in their early teens, was Star (not to be confused with the later supermarket tabloid). This would be the second wave of groupies, having given the original lot –– who had become older and maybe wiser –– a run for their rock stars. As I remember, the articles were about how to get backstage, into hotel rooms, how to be noticed by certain rock gods and how to foil the wiles of groupie rivals. Included were photos of young girls dressed in their finest groupie regalia. Star came out in the early seventies, and didn’t last more than a few issues.
I didn’t discover adult book stores until 1973 when I was old enough to drive down to Boston and visit the joke and porn shops in the Combat Zone and its environs. More attracted to the kinky fetish porn of the time, I would buy some of the Eros Goldstripe type of adult slicks such as High Heels, Unique World, Exotique, etc. The fetish porn then seemed more interesting than it does now –– very possibly because it was all new to me. Almost all the fetishes explored in those mags from the Fifties through the Seventies, became fashion statements in the decades that followed. The rise of tattooing as a major art form/fashion statement, and the magazines and books that sprang up as a result, are a perfect case in point.
There were no tattoo magazines sold on newsstands until 1983 when Easyriders published a one-shot magazine simply called Tattoos, which was the first newsstand mag solely devoted to the subject. It filled a vacuum at the time, and started the ball rolling for the, slow but sure, avalanche of tattoo mags that followed. Apart from the occasional article in girlie mags, biker mags had been the only widely available source for tattoo literature; publications like The Tattoo Advocate and, later, Tattootime were mail order only, for “people in the know." Because of the growing demand, Biker Lifestyle started Tattoo magazine (which was taken over by Easyriders after the first few issues), and a few years later Outlaw Biker put out their own Tattoo Revue. Today the number of tattoo mags on the racks is too numerous to keep track of with titles coming and going and all the special issues.
With today’s large, well lit mega-book stores, comic book department stores and the likes of Tower Records and Virgin dipping their toes in the alternative waters, small shops will undoubtedly go the way of the head shops and become extinct. The line between comics and comix has been blurred beyond recognition. Nowadays, kids buy comics hermetically sealed in plastic sleeves, and store them away as “investments."
Ballpoint pen marks, creases, book store stamps, stickers and mailing labels, all act as fingerprints as to where the magazine, comic or paperback has been. But these signs of human perusal and activity may soon be a thing of the past, with multimedia/interactive “magazines” on CD-ROMs perhaps soon becoming the norm. Totally Mad from Broderbund/The Learning Company, comprises seven CD-ROMs on which all the issues from 1952-1998 are contained in their entirety. To paraphrase a recent TV commercial for e-business, eventually you will be able to get anything ever published anywhere, in any language, at any time.
The on-line auction sites (i.e. eBay) have opened up the proverbial Pandora’s Box of all the nooks and crannies of the world, as strange publications from the past and present surface, and find their way to the cyberspace flea market. In fact, without the easy access that the internet provides for searching for these items, this book wouldn’t have existed, as the time and effort to track all these mags down physically or through the mail without the internet, would be extremely time consuming, and in some cases probably next to impossible.
But, if your lucky, you just might find that little out-of-the-way place you never noticed before. You go in. The floors are wooden and not quite level. The place is cramped and dingy. There’s a musty smell. The assortment of goods on the shelves serve almost as props, or a good excuse to have a magazine rack. The guy behind the front counter, with the red bleary eyes, doesn’t even notice you. Your eyes graze on the titles in search of the newest issue of The Interstellar Planetoid, which is nowhere to be found. They come to rest on a curious title Mondo Headpress 3000. You wonder whether it’s a descendant of that mag you read way back in the 21st century. Now that was a magazine! But, today you settle for the tabloid on the bottom shelf, the premiere issue of Horizontal Midnight.
HOME / MONDO BIZARRE / SEXPLOITATION / OUTLAW BIKERS / EDW. D. WOOD, JR. / OCCULT SEX
SHARON TATE / MANSON / MYRON FASS / VIOLENT WORLD / PUNKS
SEVEN SEVENTY / SARI - PRESS ARTS / DOMINION - TNC
CLASSIC - GSN / PENDULUM - GALLERY PRESS
Contents © 2004 by Tom Brinkmann and Headpress/Critical Vision Books