The Playboy Book: Fifty Years » (Special Value)

It began as an after-hours project laid out on a card table in the Chicago apartment of Hugh Hefner, a young copywriter whose day job was promoting subscriptions to Children's Activities magazine. It grew into the most successful and controversial magazine of its time, a fixture on the cultural landscape, an institution as universal as Disney and Coca-Cola. Here is the spectacular story of Playboy, told from the inside in never-before-revealed detail. From its very first issue in 1953, at the height of the "Ike Age," Playboy has been on the cutting edge of the socio-sexual revolution that changed the face of America, and this commemorative collector's volume offers a kaleidoscopic look not only at the magazine but the society it has reflected and influenced for decades. The Playboy Book takes readers on a nostalgic scrapbook journey into the past – the magazine's and their own. Here are the visual reminders of the best of the celebrity pictorials from Marilyn to Madonna; Playboy Interviews from Malcolm X to Jerry Seinfeld; hard-hitting reportage from Woodstock to Watergate; award-winning fiction from Steinbeck to Singer; outrageous humor from Woody to Robin; exciting artwork from Vargas to Neiman; irreverent cartoons from Eldon Dedini to Gahan Wilson; and social satire from Silverstein to Feiffer. You'll revisit the Playboy Clubs, meet the Bunnies who staffed them and the entertainers who got their start there. You'll relive the meteoric rise of the Playboy empire into and international conglomerate of hotels, movies, records, books and beyond, watch Hefner's own emergence from his legendary Playboy Mansion into a larger-than-life embodiment of the Playboy Philosophy with his own customized DC-9 Big Bunny jet. And you'll attend a gala reunion of that exclusive sorority, Playboy's 602 Playmates of the Month, from the magazine's own girl-next-door Subscription Manager, three-time Centerfold Janet Pilgrim, to Playboy's 50th Anniversary Playmate Colleen Shannon. Illustrated with more than 1500 photos from the magazine's fabled archives, written and edited with the personal assistance and cooperation of Hugh Hefner and his staff, The Playboy Book is a visual pageant that offers abundant evidence for Playboy's unchallenged reputation, after 50 years, as the best-selling men's magazine in the world.