A few years ago I interviewed Larry Grobel about his interviewing technique and some of the great interviews he’s conducted over the years, including the one he did for Playboy magazine with Marlon Brando.
Ever since our conversation I’ve casually kept an eye out for issues that contain his interviews.
In line with the colossal amount of real estate magazines have recently colonized in my brain, I’ve been looking extra hard for opportunities to buy cool, smart, beautifully designed, interesting examples of same. Playboy fits the bill. Many have unfairly slagged it as merely a degenerate girlie magazine. It’s not. Content and container are tops. For example, a lot of the interviews are deep, revealing and informative, plus there’s loads of quality writing to read, from the likes of Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Germaine Greer, Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury…many of the cartoons are actually funny, and most importantly, the design, thanks to art director Art Paul (he was there from the start, left in 1982) is groundbreaking and terrific.
A couple of months ago I scored a big whack of Playboys in lazy little Belleville Ontario, Canada.
Close to 400 I’m guessing. None from the fifties unfortunately, but plenty from the sixties through the naughties. Incidentally, I shouldn’t go around belittling Belleville. In addition to the Playboys, I also found, in Belleville, a nice collection of Fred Woodward-art directed 1990s Rolling Stone magazines, plus I attended a great performance of a very funny play called Hilda’s Yard at the local theatre.
The same troupe is just off a completely sold-out run of The Sound of Music (my friend Dave Henderson played Captain Von Trapp.
We left town before the curtain went up, but caught a dress rehearsal. It was wonderful. Some beautiful voices, some moving performances [notably from Kiersten Hanly as Maria and Willow Foley as Liesl Von Trapp], contagious enthusiasm from the entire staff, and an admirable performance from Dave!
Lots going on beneath the surface in Belleville. And, Avril Lavigne was born there.
Obviously I was interested in knowing more about the Playboys I’d acquired, which reminded me, the last time I ran into renowned book scholar Jonathan Rose ( at a SHARP conference) he’d mentioned that he was
doing some work on the magazine. ‘Way more women readers than you’d expect!’ he’d told me.
I emailed him. He directed me to a paper he’d delivered last year at SHARP entitled Readers, Magazines, Playboy, Market Research: The Daniel Starch Reports as Tools for Reading Research, I read it and teed up this conversation on Zoom. Subjects covered include Daniel Starch and his Starch Reports, Soviet readership reports, Stephen Hawking, Woody Allen, free speech, Skyhorse Publishing, gay rights, Hugh Hefner, art director Art Paul, missionaries, free enterprise, Cosmopolitan Magazine, airbrushing, pornography, conventional wisdom, myths, George Orwell and populism
Book scholar Jonathan Rose on Playboy magazine's Readership