1941

Articles from 1941

Jane Russell Sur la Plage… (Pic Magazine, 1941)

When these eight pictures of Hollywood actress Jane Russell (1921 – 2012) were snapped in the spring of 1941, she wasn’t up to much. She was studying acting at Max Reinhardt’s Theatrical Workshop in Los Angeles and more than likely waiting for her seven year contract with Howard Hughes to expire. The film that she’d made with him the previous year, The Outlaw, would not [be widely] distributed for some time and so we imagine that she jumped at the chance to put on a bathing suit and clown around on the beach when she got the call from the boys at PIC MAGAZINE. With the onslaught of the Second World War, she would be doing much of the same sort of posing for the pin-up photographers.


In the attached photo-essay, the PIC editors went out on a limb and called her one of America’s greatest beauties.

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The Thinking of Buckminster Fuller (Coronet Magazine, 1941)

Bereft of all but one illustration, this five page article delves into the design philosophy of the architect Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983) – who was very fond of the word dymaxion:

Fuller argues that the social function of machinery is to eliminate the unpleasant phases of life in the shortest possible space of time. Housing, or ‘shelter’ as he prefers to call it, should be, fundamentally, ‘a machine for living.’

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The Czar’s Paper (Coronet Magazine, 1941)

This is the story of a news daily that was published between the years 1894 and 1917 and its entire readership could be counted with one finger,the subscriber’s name was Czar Nicholas II of Russia. This unique periodical employed hundreds of correspondents (both foreign and domestic), and although only one printing of each issue was ever run, it cost the Russian taxpayers more than $40,000.00 a day to maintain.


Click here to read another article about the Czar.

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Boris Karloff: Gentle Monster (Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

Adorned with photos of the famous movie-monster-actor mowing his lawn and kissing his wife, this COLLIER’S MAGAZINE article tells the tale of how an English boy named William Henry Pratt became a famous Hollywood actor named Boris Karloff (1887 – 1969). This piece was originally conceived in order to promote the actor’s appearance on Broadway in the roll of Jonathan in Arsenic and Old Lace. The writer makes it quite clear to all that the show-biz career did not in any way come easily to Karloff and involved years of truck driving and traveling about performing in summer-stock theaters throughout the whole of North America before he was able to make a name for himself as a bit actor in the silent films of Hollywood.

Click here to read about the vulgar side of Erroll Flynn.

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