April 9th birthday shoutout to my son-in-law. He shares the birthday with quite an entrepreneur-Hugh Hefner, born 1926. He faced much criticism as he went his own way. He believed he was a champion of women’s reproductive rights, gay rights, and civil rights. Today’s selection comes from the adults-only wing of the library. Sometimes you don’t just read, you can look at the pictures, too.
“The Best From Playboy” 1955. Cartoons, stories, jokes from the first year (1954) of Playboy magazine. And as Hefner said in the introduction, “…permanently bound for your library.” I can’t argue with that.
Then “the Playboy Annual” 1956. Hefner said “We had a year of material to put the first book together; we had two years for this one, so it should be twice as good.”
“Playboy’s Vargas Girls” 1972, Playboy Press. Celebrating 50 years of Vargas’ art from the ’20’s to the 1970’s, and all of his work thus far in Playboy.
And then lastly, there were the centerfolds…”the Playmate Book” 1996, featuring five decades of centerfolds. There are stories about, insider quotes, and of course photo shots of all the women in the first 50 years of Playboy centerfolds. You need a library card, and an ID card, to check out this reference book. I will end with a few Hugh Hefner quotes:
“Life is too short to be living somebody else’s dream.”
“One of the great ironies in our society is that we celebrate freedom and then limit the parts of life where we should be most free.”
“Someone once asked, ‘What’s your best pickup line?’ I said, ‘My best pickup line is, ‘Hi, my name is Hugh Hefner.’”
Librarytomes 