"Calendar
Girl: Sweet & Sexy Pin-Ups of the Postwar Era"
by Max Allan Collins
Collectors Press, 2003
No bachelor pad is truly
complete without a good girlie calendar hanging on the wall. Guys need
a fresh face (and fabulous figure) to look back at them when they check
off the days of the week. It's good to know that throughout the decades,
the pin-up calendar has remained a staple in the life of bachelors everywhere.
Calendar
Girls is a beautiful coffee table books that features pages after
page of calendar from mostly from the 1950's.
The book is divided
into the twelve months, showing examples from each part of the year. The
focus of the book is the sketchbook type of pin-ups, where there is one
finished, colored picture surrounded by several artist sketches. These
can be everything from test poses to funny visual asides. This style was
all the rage from 1946 to about 1957because it gave you more gal for your
pin-up dollar. (Add to that the sketches on the side where sometimes more
risqué than the main pin-up.) Of course you'll find pin-ups here
from Gil Elvgren, Vargas, and Earl Moran, but the real star of the sketchbook
calendar was Earl McPherson (who signed his work "Mac Pherson"). As the
story goes, co-workers would eagerly go through his waste basket looking
for unfinished and imperfect pin-up sketches he did. The light bulb went
off, and he started to include these sketches in the final calendar itself.
It was a hit, adorning the walls of barbershops, car repair shops, fraternal
lodges, and suburban garages all across the county. And so it is today,
and then some. Pin-up calenders are not for guys anymore. You can all find
these pin-ups hanging on the walls of real-life dolls. Yup, the girlie
calendar really is a thing of beauty...something
Calendar Girls
only goes to prove.
Below are some examples
from Calendar Girls. (Click on photos to enlarge.)
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