A Hat Trick!

After the last two posts what choice did I have but to pore over my files for other examples of hats. And boy did I find one. Here we see yet another fine example, again from a 1941 issue of Young's. The scan is lousy, but in this case I do have a physical copy of the Breezy Stories where this image first appeared back in 1936. Unfortunately it is in utterly abysmal shape and my paltry photoshop skills were redlined just to get the image to where you see it. But even with these crummy reproductions it is evident that the printing quality of the Young's mag suffers terribly. If I'm lucky maybe one of these days I'll be lucky enough to get my hands on a clean copy so we can see what she looked like in all her "unenthumbered" glory.
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Contemplating our beached maiden one has to wonder why Bolles didn't get the opportunity to do work for the so-called slicks, or mainstream periodicals such as Liberty or SAT, both of which ran cheesecake covers. The easy answer is that Bolles girls were too hot. Try as he might (or perhaps he didn't) you couldn't hide that fact that the Bolles girl was not residing next door. Take a look at these side by side comparisons of work by Bolles and Liberty covers dealing with similar topics and published within months of each other.The Liberty covers smack with nostalgia and more than a bit of kitsch, whereas the Bolles girls have not lost any of the frisson that got him into trouble 75 years ago. And therein lies the problem. Bolles was just too successful for his own good.