Our magazine this week is Esquire, December 1934. Esquire was, and still is, a gentleman’s magazine for the classiest of gentlemen. Whereas Playboy sought to teach the working Joe or dweeby college freshman how to project the image of a worldly sophisticate, Esquire‘s readership needed little mentorship in that way. Shhhh. The grownups are talking now.
Meet Esky:
This creepy fvcker is the official mascot of Esquire magazine, and appeared on every cover of the magazine up to the 60s. Sensing that he was probably making babies cry in the supermarket checkout lane, Esky was moved to the Esquire logo and nowadays can be seen on the magazine’s spine. You can read more about him here: http://www.esquire.com/ente…
Esquire magazines from this period are strikingly beautiful in their vivid colors, typography, graphic design, and hefty size (it’s about twice as big as the average magazine). That’s quite an impressive list of names on the cover, isn’t it? Let’s look at the table of contents.
My goodness. Hemingway? Fitzgerald? Dreiser? Saroyan? And that’s just whom I recognize off the top of my head! Note the article about Hitler by Hanighen. Hitler at this point was treated by the foreign press as more of an enigma than anything. Eventually he would attract enough attention to be considered a punchline, then a very grave threat, then the antichrist. But since it’s 1934 and the real bad shit hasn’t gone down yet, the journalists and foreign correspondents are just keeping an interested eye on him.
Anyway, enough of that sadness. Here’s some ready made witticisms that you can pass off as yours at the next snooty society dinner party, so that all the ladies will think you’re the next Oscar Wilde! Or they’ll all be utterly befuddled because none of these makes a lick of goddamned sense, but you’ll sound super educated and hoity toity and that means you have money!
This is a genuinely fun article on carving a turkey, written in the voice of a very foppish dandy who clearly needed to shotgun a bottle of brandy before he would consider getting his dainty hands dirty (it is not the manly thing, evidently, to have the cook do the carving). However, once it gets to the actual technique of bird-carving some thousand words later, it is actually quite informative.
I mostly included this for the title.
Something about men being great at absolutely everything, even changing diapers, and evil women ruin everything I don’t know I couldn’t read through much of it without rolling my eyes to the point of a migraine.
Cartoons, much like the ones from last week’s Playboy, were a very popular part of the magazine. It took me a long time to realize that not all of them are really supposed to be laugh-out-loud funny, but like New Yorker cartoons that carry on this tradition to today they’re just the absolute driest of dry humor (the Santa one did make me laugh). You may be wondering where the hell is the punchline on half of these, and the truth is that I have no idea. Common themes include cuckoldry (the butler’s doing your wife!), hot women playing the “good girl”, old spinsters, gold diggers, etc.
The artists were also not in the least coy about being racist as fvck.
Holiday gift guide Christmas 1934! Note that almost everything is an illustration rather than a photograph. I don’t exactly know why everything was illustrated back then and photography only started to really take over magazines in the 50s, but it really does look timeless.
Let’s look at some swanky ads!
Probably the servants. What DO I pay them for?
Paula Deen’s fantasy Christmas!
Faultless…just like men!
“Here Miss Wray, have some DOLE Pineapple Juice!” “I’m trapped in my glamorous car, you buffoon!”
Finally, the back cover. Who better to sell cigarettes than the hottest athlete of the day, right?
And that’s it for this week’s old magazine. I hope you liked it and that eventually the dreams where Esky chases you down the stairs with a chainsaw will stop. Next time, we’ll be going back…TO THE FUTURE.
(not my picture)