Mark,
I remember those halcyon days very well indeed.
You are probably the first guy I have come across who has acknowledged publicly that the magazine was also of very high literary value. Hugh Hefner's Playboy Philosophy was quite something, and many of the good writers who found their way into the magazine would, for me, have remained totally unknown without that space allowing their light to shine. As for the photographers, they were second to none. I saved the magazines for years, and wouldn't have missed an issue for the world. I used to leave Playboy lying around the house, freely available for my kids to inspect should they so desire - the thing is, I don't think they ever did. As with so many things in life, it's within the prohibition that is to be found the attraction. The one person who did look through it was my mother-in-law. She would tell my wife which shots I would like the most, and then ask me to point out my choices. Most of the time, she had sussed out my photographic proclivites like reading a book!
Unfortunately, Playboy seemed to feel itself in competition with Penthouse. That may or may not have been a financial reality - how would I know - but there came a point in the Seventies where the photography crossed my personal idea of what marked the line between glamour and pornography. Consequently, having nothing but hatred for porn, a curse that had always muddied the waters of my own work in the eyes of Joe Public, I cancelled the order. I would not have felt happy for my kids to start a young exposure (or at any damned age, for that matter) to such material, especially so at home.
But still, all those old magazines, once I accepted the fact that I was no longer going to keep a collection, became very useful as cut 'n' paste source material when I used to design calendar mock-ups for clients. You never knew, but thank you, Hugh.
