Product Description
The author traces the history of "Ms"., from its pathbreaking origins in 1972 to its final commercial issue in 1989. Drawing on interviews with former editors, archival materials, and the text of "Ms". itself, Farrell examines the magazine's efforts to forge an oppositional politics within the context of the commercial culture. 17 illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Elegant analysis of timely topic
This is a wonderful book providing a fresh perspective on the history ofthis all important magazine.Farrell lucidly analyzes the tensions thatthis publication faced as it became the most recognized publication toemerge out of the feminist movement in the United States over the past 30years.She coins the term "popular feminism" in this book todescribe what Ms. set out to accomplish.She uses this term seriously andaddresses its implications with care, neither condemning the magazine orits publishers for seeking a mass audience, nor naively celebrating Ms. asa "true" mouthpiece of women everywhere. On the contrary, hertext reveals the complexity of this idea: the difficult, and ultimatelyimpossible, negotiations between commercial and social interests that themagazine attempted to negotiate, the possibilities created by a mass mediaperiodical that addressed its audiences as political subjects, and theclaim that readers made to make the magazine their own. Farrell's brilliantaccount of the history of Ms. comes at an important time as the publicationhas recently hit hard times. Some have argued that the magazine serves nouseful purpose anymore, even that feminism is dead.After readingFarrell's book, it is clear to me that neither is true, and that both Ms.and feminism are involved in complex cultural dialogues and are continuallyevolving. ... Read more

Product Description
A reference tool that indexes nearly 1000 projects from holidays or celebrations in countries and cultures around the world. Over 700 books are indexed, most of which are readily available in public and school libraries. It includes a summary of the activity and, in the case of a craft, information on patterns and materials. ... Read more

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Product Description
Makers of Culture is a comprehensive biographical guide to the ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With more than 500 contributions from over 240 specialists, the first volume,Makers of Modern Culture, provides lively and clearly written expositions of those figures who have done most to shape our views in the period since 1914. Music, cinema, drama, art, fiction, poetry, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology are just some of the fields covered in this indispensable volume. Figures covered include: Malinowski, Kafka, George Orwell, Lenin, Gaudi, Gramsci, Freud, Malcolm X, Henry Miller, Miles Davis, James Joyce, Ravel, Veblen, and Edward Sapir. The second volume, Makers of Nineteenth Century Culture, with nearly 500 entries written by 200 experts, provides a critical examination of the lives and works of the leading novelists, poets, dramatists, artists, philosophers, social thinkers, mathematicians, and scientists of the period. Figures covered include: Marx, Wagner, Darwin, Malthus, Balzac, Jane Austen, Nietzsche, Babbage, Edgar Allan Poe, Ruskin, Schleiermacher, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau, and Oscar Wilde.
Each volume is deliberately interpretative and subjects are assessed in the light of their cultural importance, making this comprehensive set both an essential reference work and an engaging collection of essays. Covering a broad spectrum of areas, the set will be of interest for general reference. ... Read more

Product Description
With more than 500 contributions from over 240 specialists, this volume provides lively and clearly written expositions of those figures who have done most to shape our views in the period since 1914. Music, cinema, drama, art, fiction, poetry, philosophy, sociology and anthropology are just some of the fields covered in this indispensable volume.
Figures covered include: Malinowski, Kafka, George Orwell, Lenin, Gaudi, Gramsci, Freud, Malcolm X, Henry Miller, Miles Davis, James Joyce, Ravel, Veblen and Edward Sapir. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume provides a critical examination of the lives and works of the leading novelists, poets, dramatists, artists, philosophers, social thinkers, mathematicians and scientists of the period. The subjects are assessed in the light of their cultural importance, and each entry is deliberately interpretative, making this work both an essential reference tool and an engaging collection of essays.
Figures covered include: Marx, Wagner,Darwin, Malthus, Balzac, Jane Austen, Nietzsche, Babbage, Edgar Allan Poe, Ruskin, Schleiermacher, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau and Oscar Wilde. ... Read more

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This catalog of works, organized alphabetically by composer, details the compositions of fifty-four modern British composers born between 1893 and 1923. Volume two covers composers from Christian Darnton to Elisabeth Lutyens. Compositions are listed chronologically and include pertinent information about the performance, year of composition, music history, first recordings, and original manuscript location. Concert music is listed separately from documentary and feature films and from music composed for radio, television or stage. A selective bibliography and a title index is included for each composer. ... Read more

Product Description
This catalog of works, organized alphabetically by composer, details the compositions of fifty-four modern British composers born between 1893 and 1923. Volume three covers composers from Elizabeth Maconchy to David Wynne. Compositions are listed chronologically and include pertinent information about the performance, year of composition, music history, first recordings, and original manuscript location. Concert music is listed separately from documentary and feature films and from music composed for radio, television or stage. A selective bibliography and a title index is included for each composer. ... Read more

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Definitions are often the first step toward granting or denying a person's rights. The "Guide's" aim is to return precise meaning and content to terms such as "refugee," "genocide," and "human rights"--terms that the media have introduced into everyday conversation, yet whose legal and political meanings are often obscure. "The Practical Guide to Humanitarian Law" explains the terms, concepts, and rules which constitute humanitarian law in accessible and reader-friendly alphabetical entries. Written from the perspective of victims and those who bring them assistance, the "Guide" effectively interprets the relevant international conventions and legal instruments applicable in situations of danger; describes the populations and persons who must be protected; enumerates the rights of victims and humanitarian organizations in times of conflict, tension, and other crises; and defines the crimes set forth by humanitarian law and the recourses it provides. It also explains the rights, duties, and responsibilities of the various national, international, and non-governmental actors in these situations and their margins of action, and lists the legal arguments that will enable them to defend their relief initiatives. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

The sort men like
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.
... Read more

Product Description
1970s: Under the counter"Separation is great, as long as the separation is of my thighs." —Adults Only

Open your notebooks, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for a history lesson like none you’ve ever experienced. You’re about to learn everything you could ever want to know about the world history of men’s magazines—not magazines about 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 body parts: the undraped female form. Former men’s magazine editor Dian Hanson traces its development from 1900 to 1980 in six massive and informative volumes.

Volume 6, the final word in this encyclopedic series, is reserved for the most daring and extreme edges of the publishing field. In the late 1960s adult bookstores and sex shops spread across Northern Europe and North America to house an increasingly explicit crop of magazines resulting from the international sexual revolution. Magazines sold on the newsstand had to conform to mass taste and morality, but in the sex shops the only limits were imagination. In the 1970s, drunk on freedom, editor’s imaginations ran wild. Come peek inside the sex shops of Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Holland and the US to see what liberation really meant. Read about Berth Milton, the man who toppled Sweden’s obscenity laws with his magazine Private; the Danish Theander brothers whose motto was, "The First, The Biggest, The Most Pornographic"; Reuben Sturman, founding father of Southern California’s vast sex industry; John Sutcliffe, who made gasmasks sexy with his Atomage magazine; and worst film director Ed Wood Jr.’s secret and surprising men’s magazines.

Volume 6: 1970s Under the Counter contains 460 full color pages of covers and magazine interiors and 18 chapters of information-rich text. Together with Volume 5 it forms a complete overview of men’s magazine publishing of the 1970s. With Volumes 1 through 4, these two books complete the six-volume set of Dian Hanson’s: The History of Men’s Magazines. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great series!!
What a fantastic series of books.
First of all, I'll take a woman's view (an attractive woman at that!) any day over a guy's view, especially when she enjoys her job.After all, I'm a guy, why would I want another guy's opinion ??The text is informative anyway.
Too bad this is out of print.Go to Taschen books website and let them know you want this volume re-printed so people will stop trying to sell these for $300+.

Nice visuals, but nothing much else going on.
This is my favorite era of pulp, and seeing the hard to find covers is a treat. The author, a pornographer with vision, is like the Ann Coulter of girly mags--unfortunately righteous, horny, and self-important. One wishes that we were given a man's take on the models and photography instead of a women well over 50 preaching at us and presenting research as some sort of creative act. Buy it for the numerous reproductions of an era for the most part lost forever. ... Read more

Product Description
1970s at the newsstand"Separation is great, as long as the separation is of my thighs." —Adults Only

Open your notebooks, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for a history lesson like none you’ve ever experienced. You’re about to learn everything you could ever want to know about the world history of men’s magazines—not magazines about 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 body parts: the undraped female form. Former men’s magazine editor Dian Hanson traces its development from 1900 to 1980 in six massive and informative volumes.

As Volumes 3 and 4 covered different aspects of the 1960s, Volumes 5 and 6 showcase the two sides of 1970s men’s magazines. In Volume 5 we explore newsstand magazines gathered from around the world. See the effects of the Sexual Revolution in Germany, England, France, North and South America, Japan, Hong Kong, and Italy. Read profiles of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Screw’s Al Goldstein, and of lesser known, but no less fascinating characters like Peter Wolff, hippie genius of the True Sex genre, and gun-toting Myron Fass, last of the pulp-pushers. See the evolutionary end-stage of sex humor magazines, the overflowing abundance of big breast titles, the emergence of swinging as lifestyle and publishing niche, the curious phenomenon of reader-written erotica, more funny, amazing and confounding ads from the magazines’ back pages and cap it all with the 70s’ top five covergirls (and one coverboy).

Volume 5: 1970s At the Newsstand contains 460 full color pages of covers and magazine interiors and 18 chapters of information-rich text. Together with Volume 6 it forms a complete overview of men’s magazine publishing of the 1970s. With Volumes 1 through 4, these two books complete the six-volume set of Dian Hanson’s: The History of Men’s Magazines. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

men's magazine maybe
While the photos in this book are quaint, the info is very short of facts or wit. But then, who buys a book with a cover like this one for the articles? Really now...

A Cut-and-Paste Once-Over
I really wish I could recommend this book for anyone interested in the popular culture of the 1970s, but I can't. Hanson provides us with scores of photos of models from the era, but virtually no substance. What little text there is is grossly padded by having parallell columns in English, German, and French.

Hanson promises "in-depth" articles about five top models; instead we are presented three-paragraph puff pieces, at least two of which are in fact patently false.

I gave this book a three-star rating. I overrated it.

Misleading Cover Photo
Don't be mislead by the advertized cover photo. You won't find it in this book. There are a few poorly reproduced photos of Roberta Pedon, but not worth the purchase price of this book. The small amount of info on this model is inaccurate and almost seems ficticious. If your not buying the book for the cover model, the book covers a large variety of men's magazine with a very small percent of the Big Bust genre. I hope this helps.

A literature review like no other
The cover photo and the list of magazines that the author has been involved with should provide a good indication of what to expect in this fascinating book, in other words, not beautiful scantily clad female fashion models photographed by skillful photographers as appeared in Playboy and Penthouse (which are notably absent from this compilation), but the world of specialist - read unsophistated, tacky and bizarre - softcore porn as it was in the 1970s. Well, some photos are typical of Playboy and Penthouse, but the majority are ones they would not have considered.Of the 1,000 + illustrations most are of covers but there are plenty of internal ones also, including cartoons and graphics. Personally I find only a minority of them appealing or a turn-on but as an historical survey this is pretty good and several countries are represented. ... Read more