Enjoying Valentine's Day, courtesy Enoch Bolles

This 1924 Film Fun cover is the earliest Bolles' reference to Valentine's day I've found. The helpless little men theme may come across as peculiar but during the mid-20's it was all the rage among illustrators who specialized in 'pretty-girl' art. In a future post I'll include every example that Bolles painted. This cover pose was reworked by Enoch five years later for a Spicy Stories cover, and he also did another variant used for an ad that ran in the same issue. The rendering of the later cover is so close I fear Enoch simply reworked the Film Fun painting, rather than start with a blank canvas.  Let's hope someone proves my theory wrong and comes up with both paintings. Now that would be some Valentine's Day present!

Time and Again

It's a fact of life that illustrators busy with looming deadlines sometimes resort to "borrowing" from the work of their peers, be it general inspiration, a certain detail, a pose or the whole piece.  Bolles himself was routinely swiped by other artists of his time and still is today, but I have yet to find a solid example where he swiped from another artist.  Granted, he often worked from photos and in some cases changed nary a thing, but he must have had some personal code about lifting ideas from artists, or at least other artists. 

 

Take a closer look above at this original from 1925--the only surviving painting I'm aware of among the 23 covers he completed for Judge magazine--and you immediately notice that time-telling detail.  And then we fast forward to 1937 and we see another Bolles girl checking if she's late for an appointment.  Bolles would revisit a number of themes  throughout his career. There was a time when I pondered just how he could possibly keep track of it all, considering he painted at least 663 magazine covers (and counting). He certainly could have benefitted from some system to keep from overgrazing the same territory, if nothing else.  But it doesn't appear he kept a ledger of his work and he certainly didn't keep many of his paintings around in his studio, although these two are still around.  My own theory is that it was all in his head. Bolles had an amazing memory, which included a rather freakish ability to recall (or perhaps calculate) the last time a date and day coincided in the calendar (and if you're curious, the last time December 3 fell on a Tuesday was just last year, but prior to that you'd have to go back to 2002).

 

But I digress. The fun thing about these examples is that you get to see Bolles' reinterpreting an idea in the context of the era and through his evolving style.  And if you want a closer look the Judge painting is going up for sale this weekend at Freeman's auction house.  And with that I'll bid her adieu.

Today is Boxing Day!

March 28: Weed Appreciation Day

Was there a "Weed Appreciation Day" back in 1936 when Enoch came up with his kinetic vision of lawn care?  If so, what kind of weed did the appreciation committee have in mind? Not that I've expended much effort at research but from what I've learned it seems the current interpretation is more along the line of consumption rather than eradication.  Clearly our Bolles girl is having plenty enough fun making hay instead of burning it.

Our next post will be on the subject of Bolles' celebrity paintings for Film Fun. There's a rare example painted in 1928 coming up for bid at Heritage Auctions and the time is right to take a closer look at this short-lived theme among Film Fun covers. Just to let you know, posts will be slower for a while. I'm working on a draft of a Bolles book that I hope to have ready for review soon.  The time seems right for a Bolles book.  Don't you agree?

Bowdacious!

No punny holiday celebrations today. In fact, no puns at all (well, maybe one or two). The theme today is that there isn't one, and so debuts a new series that will occasionally fill in for the usual topical applications. The goal will be simply to post a cover, one not chosen entirely by chance but with far less than the usual deliberation, take a closer look and see what the image reveals.

So how about today's Spicy Stories cover from 1935?! Far and away it's tops for that year and she stands, or rather sits, along Bolles' very best out of the entire run of Spicy. What about those enormous bows?!! That subdued metallic silver ribbon lacks the "coloric" punch Bolles connoisseurs are so accustomed to imbibing, yet this curiously monochromatic scheme has effective design elements that direct your attention to what matters. Consider the composition, which is unusual for Bolles. While many of his girls sat or knelt in the oft favored "L", that approach was discarded here (along with conventional clothing) for a head-on pose incorporating several visual tricks which thrust the girl right off the page into the reader's lap. Notice how the waves of ribbon draping the granite deco seat act to accentuate the horizontal plane (the pattern is repeated in her hair). The flat treatment of her torso (well...most of it) is contrasted by the more dimensional shadowing and highlights on her legs amplifies the effect. The shadow on her forehead gives the impression she's looking down on you from a superior vantage. Her expression implies the same. Is she disappointed? Annoyed? Peeved? A wasp ready to sting you for violating her territory? ("that's not your flower!") Or is she merely bored? Certainly, there's something on her mind though it would take a braver person than I to dare ask.

And this brings up another unique aspect of Bolles' work. Was there any other pinup artist of his era (granted, the term pinup originated in the early 40s) who depicted their girls with such confrontational intensity? Bolles produced a lot of covers with nary a hint of a smile. Some of his girls were bored, others pettish or merely unimpressed, and there were more than a few who confronted you with a cool, neutral gaze that conveyed an air of menace. I would venture that Bolles painted more mirthless pinups than any other artist. Throw out embarrassment as an emotional expression and you couldn't come up with a single straight faced Elvgren. Petty did haughty but after 1935 it was all smiles, and you had to wait until Playboy before you saw it from Vargas. It was Bolles who made the pinup more than just a vehicle of vapid cheeriness or abashment. But let's brave a closer look. Could that be the slightest curl of a smile on the edge of those luscious lips? Still not sure? We'll zoom in even closer when we probe the depths of Bolles' emotional range in future posts.

The Fruits of Her Labor. It's Johnny Appleseed Day!

I'm back to using Bolles covers to celebrate national or not so national holidays, and here's a fun example from a 1930 issue of Spicy Stories published during a period when Bolles was conducting a lot of fruitful experiments cross pollinating compositions and themes. I'm not quite sure of the intended storyline but I bet you could come up with several convincing scenarios.


Many of Bolles' best covers for Spicy were done during this brief period. Unfortunately it didn't last long. By the end of 1930 Bolles was entering what might be called his bobble head phase, with the product being disconcertingly young looking girls. The most troublesome examples appeared on the covers of Spicy, largely given the content and underground market for the magazine. A couple years later his girls were reproportioned, heads smaller and other parts larger. Theories abound, but perhaps it was simply a change in diet.

P.S., I've felt obliged to add word verification for comments. This is not intended to in any way constrain feedback or comments, which I am always interested in. It's just that this blog has become a target of a lot of spam and junk comments. Sorry for the added step this will require.

Who're you looking at?

It's only too bad that I don't have a better scan of this 1937 issue of Spicy Stories, or a real copy for that matter. She truly pushes the envelope--along with some buttons--and is an early example of what has been come to be called a "keyhole" cover. A lot of other pinup artists, among them Peter Dribben, seemed to favor this motif and it's become something of a standard in pinup. I've yet to come across an earlier version of the keyhole cover and is the only example I've seen where the room key is a part of the composition.

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Which brings me to the theme of this post. Who first came up with this idea? I've written other posts where I display Bolles covers that fall into one pinup setup cliché or another (upskirt etc.) but my question is whether Bolles first dreamed up this idea or did he take it from another artist. The field of etymology deals with the coinage of words and their usages but I am unaware of a visual analog of this, at least for the case of illustration.

Perhaps the time is ripe to propose the creation of a new branch of art criticism, but what to call it? Pinupology?

Hold That Pose!

Do you have a favorite style of Bolles girl? On display today are three prime examples spanning 13 years, all in the same pose and predicament. On our immediate left is a put out but still fabulous flapper from a 1924 issue of Film Fun, below we see a perky but slightly pettish officer sporting a decidedly modern interpretation of a sailor suit, who appeared on a 1931 cover of Spicy Stories, and the vamp in the body stocking from a 1937 issue (fantastic cleanup courtesy of TJ).

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Each epitomizes the Bolles style of the era though it must be said that the Film Fun girl is a lot more curvy than the John Held Jr. body type Bolles appeared to be emulating a year later. The 1931 Spicy girl comes right in the midst of a two year period when Bolles was either undersizing the body or oversizing the head on his girls, or both. And the 1937 example shows him Bolles in the apotheosis of all his mannerisms. Notice how she has not a hint of concern about the growing fissure between her seams. The concern (anticipation?) of her audience, well that's another matter. It's only too bad there isn't a version of this pose from the 1910's when Bolles was working for Judge, otherwise we could add an Edwardian version for yet another comparison.

These examples highlight one of the things I like best about Bolles, namely how he stayed true to his core. There are stylistic references in his earliest published work that run throughout his entire career, but at the same time he adapted his style for the both the fashion and the figure of the times. The other thing evident in these comparisons is that his style did evolve over the decades; the relaxed yet precise brushwork during the 1920s was gone by the early 1930s, supplanted by canvases so smooth they sometimes appears airbrushed. It's also interesting to compare the treatment the girls hands, and if you've been reading this blog you already know that Bolles was close to obsessed about how hands looked. From these examples it is clear he put a lot of thought into them. He also certainly was aware of that he was revisiting the same pose and made some efforts to avoid merely resuscitating the same stance and look. What's curious to me is how he remembered all this. He painted at least a hundred magazine covers between each of of these and so one might suppose there was something special about the initial pose (and I'm in agreement here) that made him come back to it. I do know he saved at least some of his proofs so he did have reference materials.

There are yet more examples of revisited themes, outfits and poses and I'll be sharing these in future posts.

Paint Me a Picture

A question by frequent visitor Gary about how many Bolles paintings got me onto this project, which is something I've been meaning to do for a long time. Here we see a graph showing all the Film Fun covers done by Enoch Bolles from 1923 to the magazine's last issue in September 1942. This doesn't include the 1942 annual as I don't know when it was published, nor 1922 which I forgot to add until it was too late (for the record Bolles painted the October and December issues). The Blanks during 1926-27 were months when Film Fun was not published, which I think corresponds to the period that Leslie-Judge was selling off the magazine. All later blanks are months when the magazine cover was done by another artist or were, egads, photos. The question marks represent paintings that survived for a time but may or may not still exist, with some of these having been extensively reworked by Bolles.
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As would be expected, the majority of the 29 original Film Fun paintings known to exist were from the later years of the magazine. What is interesting are the outlier years; three painting from 1925 are still around, 1937 with half of the year's output surviving, and 1940 where three and perhaps four of eight still exist. The 1937 trend holds for Breezy Stories and Spicy Stories. For some reason Bolles, or somebody else, held on to a lot of of paintings from 1937 through 1938. As far as I know, there's just a single surviving original painting from Gay Parisienne out of the 46 he did, and just one each from the entire run of Tattle Tales and Bedtime Stories. It also appears that no originals survive from 20 other titles Bolles did cover work for, but let's hope I'm wrong. As many of you know interest in Bolles' work has skyrocketed with record prices in recent Heritage auctions. This clearly has brought some pieces out of hiding, or perhaps just out of the den. Feast your eyes on this cover for the March 1938 issue of Spicy Stories that Heritage will be selling in their upcoming illustration auction. Until I saw it I had no idea the original was still around and let's hope there's more where she came from. If you have information on original Bolles paintings or corrections to my 'statistics' I'd love to hear from you!

Foxy Hunter

Just a short post this time around. I've been in England this week and have discovered that our man Bolles has been misleading us about the appearance of women on the other side of the pond. Consider the evidence on your left. Our cover girl to this 1935 issue of Spicy Stories has nothing in common with the Geordie's I've spied strolling the river walk, as attractive as they are. But perhaps I simply haven't looked hard enough, and so I will update you if my research yields any new insights. As some of you know Bolles did an entire series of covers on girls of the world and so my work must continue, undaunted.

Walk on Stilts Day?!

Yes, it is. Really! Once again, we have a perfectly topical example by Bolles on hand to help us in acknowledging this most inexplicable of celebrations. And what a great example she is. I love the bows and how the tails drape behind her. She's having no trouble at all negotiating the stilts even with those pumps. Our Bolles girl is certainly no klutz.

The Skin Game

I've just been reading a recent post in an art blog (to remain anonymous) which I typically enjoy, but not today. The post is on the topic of skin. High praise is accorded to classic artists and illustrators who dutifully chart every scar, mole, blemish and age spot. But when the example turns to pin-up artists the tone of the goes red. It is true, pin-up artists invariably make skin tones pure and rosy, glowing without the slightest taint of imperfection that the blogger and his pantheon of followers hold so praiseworthy. Not surprisingly the entire genre of pin-up received repeated lashings from the tip of a wet Windsor & Newton Kolinsky Sable brush. One comment in particular zeroed in on our man Bolles with a particularly snooty aside (comparing his girls to Gumby!) and as you might anticipate, that set me off. But first, a personal disclosure. Generally speaking I am not a pin-up fan. There are yards of it that I find insipid, misogynistic, poorly rendered or just plain dumb (think Art Frahm). But there is the good stuff and of course there is Enoch Bolles, who we all know by now was much more than just a pin-up artist. Plus it is simply unfair to compare salon artists with commercial illustrators who in the case of Bolles had the responsibility of eight mouths to feed while the economy was sunk in deep depression. Even back in his day there was a snobbery about what was called art-art versus commercial art. The debate was so serious that the guys who ran the big billboard companies would occasionally go to the absurd extreme of pasting up reproductions of classical paintings on outdoor billboards. Others claimed the art in their ads was the equivalent of fine art and so they were doing the public a service (Ha!).

Miriam Hopkins, by Enoch Bolles circa 1935. Unpublished as far as I know. As much as I admire Bolles' treatment of her skin, it's the amazing attention to her hair that really jumps out. This example should put to rest the notion that Bolles was merely a 'cartoonist'.

But back to Bolles. Skin-or at least skin color-was something he obsessed over all his life. He did not resort to tube colors or other quick fixes and in fact was continually tinkering with how to get it just right. He was trained in classic methods of painting by Robert Henri and other instructors at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design and was a keen observer of classic artists (one of these days I'll get around to posting his commentary on the techniques he thinks were used to paint the Mona Lisa). To give you an idea of Bolles' passion for getting "picture making" right, I've transcribed portions of two among the dozens of letters he exchanged with his daughter, Liza, who was a talented artist in her own right. Their correspondence involved a discussion of both theory and technique and they also exchanged study paintings. It's worth pointing out that Enoch was writing these letters from a mental hospital where he had spent nearly three decades! If there is any evidence against him "dying a mad-man" as as been claimed, then this is it. His writing reveals him to be engaged both intellectually and culturally. He was widely read and knowledgeable about an amazing range of subjects. But best of all the letters revealed his keen sense of humor and kindliness. The reality having to endure life in a hospital that housed over 7,000 patients did not rob Bolles of his humanity or sap his spirit.

Note: these are exerpts out of much longer letters. You'll notice that Enoch uses a sort of short-hand to describe certain techniques.

Enoch to daughter Liza, September, 1965 (subject: on painting a mango)

In your tilts with paints have you discovered that doing that tantalizing surface, or human skin, or an egg, depends upon a delicate progressive graying of the color from the third lighted hue on down? Lesson: mix orangy color of mango, red and yellow-this paled with white is your #2 circle with tiny bit of white in centre, #1. (Note: there is an illustration in the letter that corresponds to these numbers). To #2 mixture (orange and white) add very slightest amount of color (orange, red and yellow) and imperceptible amount of graying (blue) which will be #3, these three being your highlight. Now to #3 add small amount of color (orange) and gray slightly with blue and you have #4, the first halation from highlight. Add more color and slightly more blue #5, second halation. To this add enough color to be the true color of mango, gray slightly, #6. From here down in narrowing courses, enough in number to meet shadow, continue to add color plus red, more and more red as tone darkens and gray these with blue or black. This is not complicated after you have tried, made your mis-mixtures, finally got color and form. Of course mangos, vary in color but win your knowledge with one color of orange or light orange. If you haven't already mastered this you will be surprised by the illusion of color and form right up to the tiny brightest spot which is so important. You'll need red sable water color brush [illustrated in the letter] and of course, small flat red sable oil brushes. You will need many goes to get right mixtures and smooth blending but then you'll have a fascinating toy that most or many, painters don't have. Think of it this way; #6 is the color of mango-all above that is a sort of light-cap spreading over lighter than the true color part. Below #6 is easier, local color going down into redder hues properly grayed.

Enoch to Liza, 1968 (They had been mailing an oil portrait painted by Liza back and forth)

Our girls' neck is too dark, too red in front. Don't try for sterno-mastoid here, it would confuse you. Be led by the treatment of the copy I sent you. General color of light on front of neck, grayed red with tiny addition of yellow to match appearance but not quite brightness of face. Then match my spots of pink on cheeks and carry almost full length of cheek. Not pure pink. No made with parent color which I think was vermilion with little yellow added. Grayed of course by mixing vermilion with hue next above it and tiny bit of black. Be careful to match my grayed pink.

Now with the tiny reflected light. It is dependent upon the so-called third line which separates it from darkest lighted part of face as you see-in flesh this third line is usually made with red, black, very little which. The reflected light is usually red (more orange) bit of black, much lighter as you see, yet it can be the color of the reflecting light, whatever that may be. In modeling a garment, which the third line can be blue, almost pure, an illusion in bright lighting. Look at this old Leyendecker Post cover, double lighted, warm, cool. You will see third line running between the lights everywhere.

Desperately hunting for an Easter egg

After the pain of pulling together today's post, it may be a long while before you have to endure another of my blathering entries where I preen about having found the just perfect the Bolles art to celebrate some obscure pseudoholiday. Truth be told I was completely stymied by Easter. Out of my 'collection' of over 530 Bolles magazine covers (alas, the vast majority are merely scans) I couldn't find a single suitable example. Even Hugh Ward did a cover that as a stretch could be considered more of an Easter theme, featuring a cute chick hatching out of her egg. Ok, so it's actually some bizarre take on celebrating the new year, and what's with her weird arm pose? (One more thing about this cover, the exposed navel and low bikini line are very provocative for 1937. No wonder this magazine could only be purchased in smoke shops and pool halls).
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So the closest I could come was the cover to a 1937 issue of Spicy Stories. A very nice image to be sure but one that I had planned on saving for Magic Top Hat Day, Cartoon Bunnies Week or something of the like. To assuage my guilt and keep you from tuning out (if you haven't already) I'm sweetening this post by including something quite unusual, the original pencil sketch for the magazine cover. Alas, it is not in the best of shape but the drawing is quite revealing. For one the final painting is nearly an exact duplication of the sketch. The bunnies are even cuter and chubbier in the painting, and the top hat is larger, but that's about it. I've also included a swipe of the cover by Earle Bergey. He clearly had no trouble with the girl's anatomy (though the shoes should have gone back into the closet) but there is nothing nice that can be said about his Easter bunny, which looks more like an albino jack rabbit. She should stuff him back in the hat and try again.

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.

Happy 2009!

Looking back at the short life of this blog, there is much to celebrate. In the early days, no matter how deep you Googled Enoch Bolles, The Blog On Enoch was nowhere to be seen, but now it shows up on the first page of Google. TBOE has gained a fascinating group of followers with great blogs and web-pages of their own you ought to check out, and I've heard from others who have become fans of Enoch Bolles. I'm also grateful to Leif Peng for giving space in his fabulous blog, Today's Inspiration for me to introduce the Bolles blog, and for Shane Gline and others who have reviewed or linked TBOE. And finally, a special big-up to my main man, Brandon "the dawl" Dawley, who has given this blog such a fabulous look. Brandon's work was recently featured on Drawn! Do stay tuned as I've got a lot of great things in store for 2009, including scans of newly 'discovered' paintings and a feature on the women who modeled for Bolles.

Happy New Year!
Jack

Do you Prefer Your Bolles Hot or Cold?

After the post last week on bulls-eye covers my Bolles pal, Beau reminded me about a great one from Spicy Stories that I had omitted. In the middle of composing a post using the cover it dawned on me that Bolles had done a similar composition several years later. So here they are, the Spicy cover from 1935 and the Film Fun from 1942. I've seen this sort of thing before. I'm sure that in some cases Bolles was in a hurry, understandable when you consider that he often painted three or more covers a month. And so he may have decided to go back and rework a theme he developed in the past for the sake of time. When he was in a big hurry he also simply overpainted parts of earlier covers and he pulled more than a few all-nighters to meet a deadline. But with other covers I think his motivation in revisiting old themes was to try something new, perhaps updating a painting to current fashions or putting an entirely new slant on it. I've seen a number of cover paintings where Bolles later tinkered with hair, clothing or jewelry, apparently not happy with the original. In many cases the original was best left alone but I have seen a painting with the lotus flower Film Fun cover that is a lot more interesting, and not just because he decided the updated girl didn't need clothes! One more thing to leave you with. As I've mentioned before, Bolles was fixated with hand position and poses and this Film Fun cover has about the oddest combination I've seen on any cover. What do you think is going on?

Due to several requests, here's the second image in a larger format. Enjoy!

Too Much Turkey?

Feeling guilty about all that turkey stuffing you stuffed yourself with? Well, you're not alone. On your left is the first of a recurring theme the Bolles girl had with the issue of weight control. This cover from 1927 shows our flapper contentedly posing on a scale, but only two years later and presumably a few ounces more there clearly is some alarm about the issue of weight. Not that she seems to have anything to worry about. Bolles' girls were among the slimmest of any pretty girl (again I am resorting to the standard term applied during this era) artist, aside from John Held Jr.'s stick figures.

The dictum emerging here is calories-in calories-out. By the mid 1930s Bolles girls were typically less active and spent more time indoors posing placidly than their outdoorsy counterparts from a decade earlier, hence the need for the dulling daily dozen (though with an assist from a slimming machine). A lot has been written about how magazine and advertising imagery contributed to a preoccupation with physical appearance, but what is unclear is whether Bolles was reacting to and commenting on this phenomenon or actually contributing to it.

Spicy Stories 1932

This is a real oddball for Bolles and for a time I wondered whether somebody else painted it. I also found the photo he used and this painting follows closely to it. You have to wonder why Bolles went to all the trouble to so carefully outlining all those tiles, but he had some mathematical ideas about composition and painting so who knows. I'll post some other atypical covers soon.

Ride em cowgirl

One of my favorites in the cowgirl theme. Bolles lavished attention on shoes and in this cover the boots (aren't they great) serve as the focal point of the composition. Bolles painted at least a half dozen other cowgirl covers and I'll feature them all together in a future post, along with some of his other pinup themes.

Handle With Care

Oh the abuse pulp magazines took to survive 70 or 80 years. First they were thumbed to death, especially the spicy pulps that bore repeated 'reading'. Then if they weren't tossed out in the trash they were left to molder for decades in the attic. Here's a fabulous Bolles cover in anything but fabulous shape. I'm pretty good with Photoshop but reanimating this was beyond my abilities. Not so with my pal, TJ. Take a look below at what he was able to do with this cover. Simply amazing! Honestly she never looked this good in real life. TJ has a site where you can download lots of other pinup and glamour art, and he'll be soon adding a Bolles section. The site is intended for grownups so be forewarned.


Here's the link: https://www.exchange.iu.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=5f58680788bd42fcba2a38aba923cb5d&URL=http%3a%2f%2ftj.eroticillusions.com