Spring has Sprung

I've been saving this cover for a special occasion and thought it had a nice Spring-like feeling to it.  She was likely painted in 1937 or '38 but I only have the cover, so I can't definitively date it.  Bolles rarely used much pink.  It was hard for engravers to get right, especially next to skin tones and even more so when the printing quality wasn't so great to begin with.  But probably more important, as a printer once advised Bolles, "use any color as long as it is red."

March 11 is Johnny Appleseed Day!

I was waiting patiently for some excuse, oddball holiday or otherwise, to post this cover. It's a reprint that appeared in a 1946 issue of Breezy Stories but was likely  first published in 1937 or '38.  Out of the the 20 plus magazine titles Bolles did work for my records for Breezy are the spottiest.  Why I have no idea. 

Santa's Baby

Beginning in 1928, the January issue of issue of Film Fun (which showed up on the newsstands a calendar month early) featured a Christmas theme.  Here we see the cover for 1931; Santa seems particularly cheery but then again, rarely has he been the recipient of such generous gifts. The streak of Christmas covers ended the following year but Bolles clearly liked this composition enough to use it in a far more raucous new year's celebration for the January, 1936 issue of Breezy Stories. This has to qualify in the top tier of covers top for the magazine, which is saying a lot because Breezy paid Enoch more than the average pulp and in return he put a lot of extra work into his covers.

So is there any wonder as to why the beau of the Bolles' girl is beaming?  The lucky guy, after Santa there were only one or two other times where the Bolles girl shared the spotlight on the cover with a member of the opposite sex.  And from the look on his face he seems quite grateful to take the supporting role.

The Summer of '42

Is it as cold where you are as it is here?  It seems like a large swath of the planet has recently been struck by bad weather.  And it's not even Winter yet!  To to warm things up I'm posting a really inventive cover for the August 1938 issue of Breezy Stories.  In fact it was his Bolles' final assignment for the magazine.  His fifteen year run of covers for Film Fun also ended the same month, due to his hospitalization for what his doctor described as overwork and undernourishment.  Yet it would be over a year before Bolles returned to commercial work and in the meantime the magazine industry was in the throes of a sea change.  Just two months before this Bolles girl waded into the newsstands, Action Comics #1 was published and the comic book began its ascendancy into the print media stratosphere, carried by the steely arms of Superman. The publisher was Harry Donenfeld, who had clawed his way up the business by publishing Spicy pulps, most all of which Bolles had done work for at one time or another.  In preparing this post I learned that as a young man Donenfeld worked for a clothing store his parents owned in Newark in the 1920s.  Bolles grew up in Newark and his family had strong business ties in the community, including a successful shoe manufacturing business.  One has to wonder if they first crossed paths there. 

By the end of 1939 Bolles was back on the job for Film Fun but his other markets had dried up. Breezy Stories was sold off and the new publisher scrimped by recycling old covers. Both Spicy Stories and Gay Parisienne had ceased publication, victims of declining sales, badgering by the decency leagues, and perhaps Donenfeld's preoccupation with his burgeoning comic book company.  In the meantime Bolles was back in top form and doing great work, having updated his girls for the 1940's with WW-II styled pinup poses and Rita Hayworth hairstyles. 

Which way is she leaning?

Did you vote? Our Bolles girl is still pondering who to cast her ballot for. Let's hope she supports our party!



This is one of three issues of Breezy Stories from 1936 that the original painting is known to survive. Unfortunately my versions of both the magazine and painting leave something to be desired, and that's too bad because this cover has so much going for it. For unknowns reasons there are even more original Breezy Stories paintings from 1937 still around, and I'll get around to putting them all up on a post before long.
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On the topic of original Bolles paintings, just this week I got my hands on a copy of an art catalog from 1936 which has photos of nearly 20 Bolles originals. Over half are paintings I figured didn't survive the trip to the publisher's trash bin, and it gives me hope that at least a few are still be around somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered (expect an entire post on the catalog images sometime soon). If I had a clue where I bet we could rally together a few volunteers for some door to door "canvasing".

Women in Black

There's no reason to revisit the theme of Bolles black unless we feature one of his most outrageous covers. Netty but Nice is simply over the top on all counts; her wild outfit, Bolles amazing treatment of all the different materials and textures, that fabulous deco chair, those shoes! Netty debuted in 1937, a great year for Film Fun and for collectors because-for reasons unknown-more Bolles paintings from 1937 to 1938 have survived than from any other period of his career. Sorry the scan is so poor but after all the years I've been collecting Bolles, this issue continues to elude me. So to make it up to you I've posted a detail out of the original painting (alas it has eluded me as well). As the side by side comparison with the printed cover-which was pretty well done- makes immediately evident, a lot of interesting detail and subtlety was lost in the reproduction. By the way, you can get a fabulous Giclee print taken from the original painting at Impact Graphic posters. For those of use who can't afford a Bolles original (and who can these days), it's the next best thing.

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The Madame X post prompted me to take a closer look at just how many cover girls in black Bolles painted and it turns out that throughout the 1930s about one Film Fun cover a year had a predominately black color scheme. Bolles did almost none for other periodicals and I think there are two reasons for this. First, just about all of his other magazine work was for magazines even spicier than Film Fun, and so the color schemes and poses typically ran at hotter temperatures. And second, the quality of printing was poorer. In some cases, covers were printed in only three colors and the lack of a black print run could add a murky atmospheric quality to the work, which is not necessarily a bad thing for horror or gangster pulps as my friend and mega-collector, the late Pete Manesis once pointed out to me. He felt that some cover artists who knew their work was going to be printed in three colors altered their palette to take advantage of the effect. But gangsters and fiends are one thing, and pretty girls another. Bolles faced a different set of challenges doing work for the smoosh mags.


Turning back to Film Fun, I think this cover from 1934 counts among his very best examples of women in black. The image by the way, was a complete swipe from a publicity photo (I've got it around somewhere and once I find it I'll add it to this post) but as usual Bolles adds his own signature to the painting, the cleverly worked shadow both grounds the pose and lends an almost geometric element to the composition. On the subject of signatures, there was a letter printed in this issue from a reader who inquired why Bolles signed some of his covers but not others. Truth is that he often did not sign his work but I've also seen a number of original Film Fun paintings with signatures that ended up being tooled or cropped out of the cover. Why that was done is the question I would have asked the editor.


Finally, a very recent "discovery" and what must be one of the wackiest Bolles covers of all. When I found this scan from a 1943 issue of Breezy Stories I had to do a double-take. How do you begin to explain it? Perhaps Netty became bored from all that posing and preening and so donned some gloves and a muffler and headed outside to catch some fresh air, glorying in the garish winter (nuclear winter?) sunset. It's almost as if Bolles was doing a riff on himself as Quintana might have interpreted the Netty girl. As bad as I'd like to have a copy of the Film Fun Netty girl issue in my collection I want this one ten times worse.

Bolles on Ice. Very Nice!

Sorry for the long absence. Blame it on my day job.


In celebration of the winter Olympics I thought it only appropriate to feature one of the sports and also a classic theme in pinup. It was probably George Petty, with his series of paintings for the Ice Capades programs, who did more to popularize the theme of pinup on ice than any other artist. But he certainly wasn't the only illustrator to mine that vein. Our man Enoch produced some fine examples, including this one from the January 1942 issue of Film Fun. Included below for your edification is Bolles' pencil sketch for the cover. Bolles produced at least three other preliminary drawings and to me it's interesting that after nearly two decades of Film Fun covers--and in the final months of the magazine--Bolles was still at it, working on different poses to come up with just the right version.




I've also posted another nice skating cover from Breezy Stories. Sorry for the condition of this issue, but I only have the scan and am not sure what year it was published. If I had to guess it would be 1935, but the odd thing is that this cover has a 'real' Bolles signature, and not the engraved version I wrote about in a previous entry. As far as I know it's the only cover of Breezy he actually signed.

I don't know about you but I think our Bolles girl deserves a perfect score of 10 for artistry.

Back to the Beach

It was just a few posts ago where I was speculating about the origin of the lovely lady adorning the cover of a 1941 issue of Young's Magazine. Well since then I was doing some "house cleaning" and what did I come across but a clipped cover from a 1935 issue of Breezy Stories, featuring our girl in her original outfit and as you've undoubtedly noticed, a different beach companion. Not that I can tell whether it's a Loggerhead or Hawksbill but Bolles did use the Girl on a Turtle theme for at least one other cover (a 1937 issue of Gay Parisienne).

Aside from the turtle the cover is notable for the signature, added by the engraver. Several other covers of Breezy Stories, all from 1935 have the added signature as well as a cover art credit for Bolles on the title page, which an acknowledgement even Film Fun never afforded Bolles. This version of the cover was used again as a closeup in a 1938 issue of Breezy. I'm sure Bolles didn't get a dime extra for it and I doubt whether he got anything for the remake either. By 1940 Painter Publications was using recycled Bolles' covers for virtually every issue of Young's Magazine. The puzzle is why is this one different, and in such a special way.

Is this what she ended up wearing to the beach?

After my last post I had been lamenting the fate of our beach beauty so cruelly left off the front page, when another possibility flashed in my head. So I present this smashing cover that appeared on the newsstands in 1941 in the dysfunctionally titled Young's Snappy Realistic Stories. As best as I can tell, Young's was sort of a mash-up with the remains of what was once merely Young's Magazine along with dollops of Breezy Stories, Snappy Stories and perhaps Yellow Book, all of which were the legacy of the publisher Courtland Young, who got his start back around 1912 with the long lived Snappy Stories. Snappy is regarded as the first of the so-called sex pulps and more important for us, is where Bolles had some of his best work published. In the mid-1930s these titles were acquired by Phil Painter publications who managed to keep Breezy Stories on the newsstands until nearly 1950, in part by recycling many of Bolles early Breezy covers. Unfortunately, Bolles had no residual rights to his artwork and so didn't see a plug nickel out of this. Worse yet, take a look at the lousy hand lettered text penned in directly over Bolles signature. This was clearly no accident, Painter publications was not only too cheap to shell out for new cover art, they also weren't even willing to pay to have an engraver to tool out Bolles' signature or block it out with some type. Fortunately for us, Bolles still gets credit for what was a really smashing cover that imaginatively combines several of his signature elements. There's the unique employment of the bull's (Bolles'?)-eye as a compositional element and as a frame for the background. Notice how it intersects her hat precisely at its at its apsides or extremes--not by accident--and that the arc of the circle also intersects the shadow cast over her face). There's also the bimorphic shadow, a really cute animal feature with terrier and the the red blanket, which acts both as a sort of shadow but also works to thrust the composition toward the viewer. Basically the entire repertoire of Bolles tricks.

The only problem with this story is the image to our right, clearly the same girl as the Young's cover, albeit cropped and in a different suit. This issue of Breezy is from 1938 and I'd bet the cover was likely reused from yet an even earlier issue, perhaps as early as 1935 during the short time when Bolles was signing his covers for Breezy. So it's more likely the concept painting in the previous post was inspired by this cover rather than the other way round. But what about the costume change in the two versions I show here? It just makes the sorting this out more complicated, compounded by the unfortunate fact that I lack a complete run of covers to Breezy or Young's. So there remains work to be done and art to be discovered!

International Eat an Apple Day!

Ok, so it was yesterday, but I'm not about to wait another year, simply to be calendarically correct. The Breezy Stories is a 1944 reprint from an issue I would bet was published in 1937 or '38. For whatever reason a very large proportion of Bolles originals that survive were painted during this two year period. It's too bad this cover suffers from such lousy printing but below I have reprinted the original painting, or what became of it. Bolles reworked a number of his paintings a

nd again, most were originally done in 1937 or 1938. In my estimation the original is preferable to the repaint, but it does show how richer his

palette was than what appeared in the printed version. I also think the repainting may have been a sort of warm-

up for his cover for the April, 1942 cover of Film Fun which could well be considered his most

brazen. I'll do an entire post on her soon and so you can judge for yourself.

Signature Statement

In my previous post I closed with a challenge to find an unusual element to the Breezy Senorita, and I must admit it was not easy. Take a look below and you'll see the answer. It was Enoch's signature. Or at least what looks like a Bolles signature because I don't think he actually signed it. Aside from Film Fun Bolles only signed a handful of magazine covers and for the record here are the titles: America's Humor (one issue), Gay Book (two out of seven issues), Screen Romances (two issues), Talking Screen (one issue), Judge (nearly every issue he did), Puck (one issue), and Wit O' the World. He initialed almost all of his covers for Snappy Stories and a few for Laughter, Live Stories and Zest, but that was it. My guess is that less than half his Film Fun covers were signed or initialed though I've seen several originals where the signatures were cropped out or perhaps even tooled out by the engravers. Bolles was more apt to sign Film Fun in the 1920s and by the late 1930s he had virtually stopped (one of these days I'll put all this up on an Excel spreadsheet). Even his family had to beg to get Bolles to sign portraits he had done for them.

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But when Bolles did sign his covers his name became a part of his compositions. They were rarely rubber stamped; he constantly tinkered with the lettering which varied from issue to issue, as did the color. Often, he positioned it half in shadow so the lettering would transition from positive into negative space. Compare Bolles with the invariance of George Petty, who's signature was essentially a chop (no wonder, he trademarked it) and Vargas (who had it trademarked without his knowledge!). Armstrong's was a gorgeous mess of loops, almost begging to be yanked into an indecipherable Gordian knot of a scrawl, but after some early experimentation, it never changed.

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So now take another look at the Breezy Stories signature and you'll see how wrong it looks. Aside from the scale, which is smaller in relation to the painting than anything else Bolles has done, it just seems off. Missing is the sweeping brush stroke and casual skill with lettering so evident in the other examples. Instead you get what looks like an attempt at forgery, which is what I think it is. In 1935, the year this cover was first published there were several other Breezy covers that were signed by Bolles, and the signature looks exactly the same in each. I think what we are seeing is an engraver's attempt at copying the Bolles signature. Aside from four or so covers in 1935, no other of his Breezy covers were signed.

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Now let's reexamine our feature cover, from 1932. Bolles put a lot of extra flourish into the signature (and I'm sorry this copy has so much cover wear). It is unusual but the girl is the real outlier. The painting is well done and likely an accurate depiction of Margaret but alas, she looks nothing at all like a Bolles girl. And just who was Margaret Poggi is another bit of a poser. I could not find out a lick about her, even on imdb.com. It makes me wonder whether this image may have been a sort of leftover from an assignment Bolles did for Fox Films (he did some work for the company from time to time). If anyone could find something out about her or even better, snag a photo I would be grateful.

The $ Game

Yesterday Heritage auctions sold off another wing from the warehouse of works from the Martignetti collection. The prices for the Bolles paintings on the auction block as well as some of his other pinups were in a word, astonishing. The previous record for Bolles at auction was a bit over 38 grand at an Illustration House auction held several years ago. It was the painting was for this cover of Breezy Stories published in 1937 (for some reason a lot of paintings from 1937 have survived) and when you look at the magazine cover (gotta love that nameplate) it's easy to see why bidders were so motivated.

But the prices realized yesterday put Bolles in a whole new ballgame. His top item was the Slipping Beauty cover for the February, 1935 issue of Film Fun. There's no doubt that it is a special Bolles but I was shocked to see that when the mallet fell the winning bid topped $65,000! It went more than the Petty's, the Vargas pinups for Playboy and even a really nice Elvgren (though two other Elvgren's went for an incomprehensible 200 grand!!). Unless pinup collecting has suddenly become a hobby of Goldman Sachs traders, it is hard to fathom this recent surge of interest. On one hand I'm pleased to see works of Enoch Bolles gaining wider recognition and interest (you can see a video of a couple of the paintings and other nice examples from Martignetti's collection at the Heritage auction web site) but on the other hand it bodes poorly for many collectors who might hope someday to own their own original. A few people have given me a bit of grief for contributing to this trend, but I sincerely doubt that anything I've written about Bolles has had an impact on this. I hope not, at least not until after I get my hands on that one particular Bolles original I pray is still out there sitting in somebody's closet, begging for a new home.

The Profound and the Profane

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Today's topic continues with a subject I've glanced over a few times but have yet to truly face head on, and that concerns the conflicting themes running through Bolles' work. Most people in the know are well familiar with his Film Fun covers, his racier fair from Spicy Stories, and perhaps this cover from Cupid's Capers, which Francis Smith described in his book Stolen Sweets as an erotic masterpiece, though some would describe it in very different terms. Back in the 1920s and 30s his work evoked even stronger feelings. Film Fun was banned for a time in municipalities such as Ann Arbor and Denver. Newsstands that carried it and other titles that often featured Bolles' art were raided by the authorities in Chicago and New York, where Mayor LaGuardia's Citizen's Committee on Civic Decency targeted newsstands and smoke shops that trafficked in the so-called smooshes. To avoid getting caught and the publishers went to extremes, creating false companies, and phony addresses. It was a constant shell game between them and the cops so when one got busted it would make the news. Harry Donenfeld, who published Gay Parisienne, Spicy Stories and other mags with Bolles covers--and who later upgraded to comic books--got hauled in several times. In one instance he had one of his staffers take the fall and do jail time and in another court case had the greater gumption to tell the judge his rags compared with "God's Little Acre" and "Ulysses." He went so far to claim that his magazines performed a vital public service: "A girl just out of school-she's the most easily ruined. But after she's read our magazines she knows sex. She knows life. She's better able to protect herself." The jury was unconvinced.

Film Fun generated enough heat, or at least outrage, that entire countries got into the censoring act and and for a time it was banned in Australia, Japan and Canada beginning back in 1925, one month after that problematic Valentine cover I recently featured. Coincidence? Even Bolles' most sedate work found ready foes. In 1938, Scribner's magazine wrote the following in regards to the Bolles image below: "Contrary to the belief of many who have not seen beyond the covers of Breezy Stories, its appeal is in no sense pornographic", which is a bit hard to swallow when you examine the image, especially compared to the girl featured in my last post. Lacking a decent scan of the magazine I've posted an album cover from the 1970s that it was used on. Exciting yes, but pornographic? But we must remind ourselves that this image was viewed through the lens of a different time. Even a decade earlier a report on reading habits sponsored by the Carnagie Corporation (that's what it was called back then) identified Film Fun as a magazine typically read by "those of low native intelligence" and another national study on reading indicated it was favored by "dull children." Well all I know is there must be a lot of dullards with spare change in their pockets because the competition for Film Fun on eBay has become fierce.

We'll continue exploring this topic from time to time over the coming months, particularly as it relates to the artist's model, which was sort of a cultural hot button from the very beginning of the Golden Age of Illustration. We'll find out what happened when a New York newspaper exposé on the exploitation of artists' models tried to entrap none other than C.D. Gibson with a fake model.

A Recent Acquisition

Of over 300 Bolles covers in my collection a bare handful are Breezy's, and most are the 1940s reprints. It's hard to figure why because Breezy had the highest circulation of any magazine Bolles painted for, even Film Fun. Yet they seldom show up for sale at the usual venues, and when they do they are in typically awful shape (yes, its been heavily photoshopped). This issue comes from 1935, the apex of Bolles' work on this title (he even signed a few of them!), and it's my favorite. He's got both his hand poses working here: the raised pinky (which looks almost broken here but I think he did it to repeat the curve of the lantern), and the joined middle fingers. I especially like the light playing through her left hand. And the dramatic light and shadow is rare for Bolles as he considered it an artistic crutch (which is too bad). Finally, the theme of pretty girl with Japanese lantern was popular with artists in the early 20th century and I think this is Bolles personal response to it.

Oh, as to why so few Breezy's, here's my theory. Breezy didn't have any photos and the stories were straight romance. So you read it once through and tossed it. There was no reason to squirrel them away in the sock drawer like gramps did with Spicy Stories or Tattle Tales.

Did you vote?

Nice pumpkin!

Just in time for Halloween. Is that a happy pumpkin or what! This cover for a 1945 issue of Breezy originally appeared sometime in the 1930's, but I'm embarrassed to admit I don't know the year. I have images of nearly 500 of Bolles' magazine covers but my records for Breezy Stories are the spottiest of all of the magazines he did work for. And Breezy Stories was one of the highest paying and most widely circulated among the many pulp titles Bolles was associated with. In fact for a time he even signed his covers for Breezy, something he did regularly only for Film Fun and for a few issues of Gay Book. My theory is that Breezy was a read and toss magazine whereas some of the other pulps Bolles did work for such as Tattle Tales, were more apt to bear repeated gazing, if not reading.