Brigitte Kruger

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How They Used To Look

Perhaps you've always thought that your grandparents and great-grandparents were much too absorbed with the pressing problem of high stiff collars and tangled horse traffic to spend any time or energy on promoting cheesecake. Perhaps you've always thought that cheesecake and pin-ups represent something you invented, and perhaps you're even a little smug about it.

In our present frame of mind where we're beginning to think it's dead square to kick a ball around, we're inclined to think the Edwardians and Victorians the epitome of establishmentarianism and whatever that means it sounds dead grim.

It's not true. The Edwardians and the Victorians invented the pin-up when they flung their toppers and carnations in uninhibited joy at the Can-Can girls. The difference is that they liked their pin-ups with plenty of frills and we favour the bikini types.

The pin-ups of those days used to look like BRIGITTE KRUGER looks here, complete with furbelows and hats and everything. Jolly good.

Span No 140 - April 1966

Hazel Shaw

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Highly Polished

Never looking anything else but well-groomed is HAZEL SHAW, one of our favourite pin-ups. Hazel, a secretary, reflects the high polish of her gleaming car here.

Blonde, trim and vivacious, Hazel likes to model from time to time, it makes a glamorous change from keeping the office and the boss properly organised. She lives in a green suburb of Glasgow, overlooking a golf course, and the golfers at weekends are always slicing balls into her garden.

It's the most understandable slicing we know of.

Beautiful Britons No 232 - March 1975

Martina Evans

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Martina Mia

That's the Latin for Martina belongs to me, which is what some lucky guy will be able to say when MARTINA EVANS decides he's the one to take her to the altar for better or worse. If he's the right kind of guy it can only in his eyes be for the better, as what with her talents for cooking and her photogenic grace, Martina must make life better for any man.

Spick No 186 - May 1969

Renate Dittmann

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Don’t Get Shirty

It's no good rushing up and down the stairs and shouting your head off when you find your sister, or your wife has nicked your best shirt and is wearing it at the Festival of Flowers.

Women, especially sisters and wives, don't respond at all these days to men getting noisily shirty. Gone are the times when the little woman or the doting sister flinched and cowered at the mere sound of the brute. Lay a hand on your sister these days and you'll likely end up looking like the well-worn end of a Chinese puzzle. Put the lightest finger on your wife and you could find yourself scarred for life. Someone's been teaching them to fight back.

The boyfriend of RENATE DITTMAN is wise enough to know that whenever Renate borrows any shirt of his it's better for him to laugh it off. "My goodness," gasped Renate, "where's that shirt I was wearing?" “ I laughed it off," says he.

"Oh, clever stuff, hein?" says Renate, and punches him in the eye.

Lesley Lovell

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Just An Old-Fashioned Dolly

Very lovely and old-fashioned is Secretary LESLEY LOVELL, who works in London, is quite happy about nine to five and suspender gear, and never goes on about what the world owes her and how to blow up people she doesn't like. She thinks gunpowder and gelignite a bit uncivilised. What we need, we think, is a lot more like Lesley and a lot less of the others.

Elmer Batters

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Elmer Batters - New Page Available

What is it that attracts and holds the eye of the male? What are the qualities essential to feminine allure? Let me give you a hint. It begins at the tip of the toes and runs to the top of the hose... legs and feet.

I tried to cast a spell of enticing charm with my photographs. The posing of a woman's legs is as important to glamour photography as seasoning is to a tossed green salad! And, incidentally, stockings without seams lack allure. Seams emphasize the curve line.

Read More

Pam Johnston

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Groovy Girl

If you're addicted to Long Johns, you're with it, and right in the groove is PAM JOHNSTON with her latest.

Long Johns went out when the mini skirt went high but came back again when they thought about the maxi. Point is you need something warm in the winter, don't you, and the hot chestnut man isn't always around when you most need him.

Spick No 186 - May 1969

Melanie Cooper

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This Is The Life

When she's at work MELANIE COOPER is a telephone operator and if you know a more scintillating hello girl than Melanie, please let the rest of us share the bliss of hearing her golden voice.

Melanie had a day off when these photographs were taken. More than anything else Melanie loves the call of the fresh air. Not surprising in one who is clamped to a switchboard so much. The outdoor environment is the life for her. There she can gambol free and untrammelled through leafy woods.

There she can make the most delightful subject for anyone's camera, and you don't have to like leafy woods yourself. You just have to like Melanie.

How can you fail to?

Black Silk Stockings

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Stairway or Stareway?

Which radiates with the most pleasing eye-appeal, a STAIRWAY or a STAREWAY?

It is a known fact that a STAIRWAY is a flight of plain, ordinary stairs leading from one level to the other. This plain, ordinary STAIRWAY is immediately transfigured into a STAREWAY only when an attractive girl, with a pair of shapely legs encased in a pair of sheer BLACK SILK STOCKINGS, saunters leisurely up or down the STAIRS enjoying all the STARES. Perhaps a few readers might not yet be ardent leg connoisseurs and hence remain a little dubious about the above theory, so we shall prove out point by illustrating a STAIRWAY that has been transfigured into a STAREWAY through the black magic that radiates from BLACK SILK STOCKINGS.

By Elmers Batters - Black Silk Stockings Vol 1 No 5 (1958)

Petra Germaine

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What's Keeping You?

Apart from the fact that PETRA GERMAINE is all tied up with domestic cable and can't join the girl next door for elevenses until she's sorted herself out, the only other knotty problem she's got concerns her return to West Germany.

It's like this, you see. Petra came to London for a short visit last year, just to see what it was all about and whether the Changing of the Guard really was full of redcoats.

It isn't recorded whether Petra was as much impressed with the Guard as the Guard was impressed with Petra, and if every member of the Guard came to a halt on the wrong foot and the front rank cannoned into the Guard Commander, that could merely have been an epoch-making clanger completely divorced from the presence of Petra.

All we know is that Petra is still around and that all her boy friends in West Germany are sending her postcards asking, "What's keeping you?" It isn't the Changing of the Guard, but it could be a handsome Guardsman. Petra is nineteen, by the way, and measures 36"-23"-36".

Elmer Batters and More

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Great Collection

Recently I was lucky enough to acquire a collection of magazines, prints and negatives from a private collector who had been amassing his horde of Elmer Batters and the like for many years.

As far as I am concerned, it is one of the nicest collections I have ever purchased.

Hundreds of American magazines from the 1950’s and 60’s all in excellent condition. Hundreds of original 8x10 prints and 1000’s of negatives to be catalogued. Some of them rare and extremely hard to find, and I am certainly enjoying sorting through it all.

It will take me time to catalogue, sort and decide how best to deal with it all. But be assured, most of the magazines will be scanned for us to enjoy before they are sold on to collectors and possibly disappear for many more years.

I will be digitising some of the negatives and prints, which I will post in the blog but ultimately, they too will be sold. Help with naming models is always appreciated.

They will be on sale here on site and on eBay - I have added a new link for all eBay sales. I will regularly update the new items blog, making it easy for you to recognise what has been newly added.

So, I think we all have a lot to look forward to, but it won’t be an overnight process; it will take months to do. I will have years of pictures for posts and who knows what for the future!

BrazenBooks Update

BrazenBooks will be getting eBooks in time, and I have some exceptional books currently being digitised. These will slowly be prepared for sale and made available for download. I will post an update here when they become available.

The future looks bright!