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First girlie mags
The first "girlie magazines" were intended to be respectable, emphatically not "pornographic".
The first magazine
to merit the adjective "girlie" was "Esquire", which, in the 1930s, was the only
one of its kind. The decision to
carry pin-ups was bold and innovative; "Esquire" began, incidentally, as a men's fashion
magazine, hence the
status title. The first issue of the magazine had a printing of 105,000 copies, 5,000 of which
were to be
distributed to newsstands and 100,000 to clothing stores throughout the U.S. The first issue
was, however, so
popular that 95,000 copies were recalled from clothiers and redistributed to newsstands. The
first issue was also
significant in that it carried George Petty's famous pin-up girl, appearing at first more as a
cartoon than a pin-up.
She soon represented a singular female type that was destined to become almost as much a
legend as the Gibson
girl had been thirty years earlier. In early 1941, the Petty girls began to appear regularly in
"Esquire's" first
foldout pages.