Maybe fifteen years ago, at a Southern California flea market, I found a yellow Kodak box of color slides with “Raymound”—yes, with a U—written across it.
I pulled out the first slide and held it toward the California sun.
Bettie Page.
And a photograph of Bettie I’d never seen before.
Sold.
When I got home, I went through the rest and discovered another Bettie among a couple dozen wonderfully tame, slightly mysterious “girlie” photographs. Then I did what collectors do: I put the box away.
For about a decade.
Recently, I rediscovered Raymound’s slides, scanned them, and decided it might make a terrific little Thing. So I started laying my idea out.
Once I had a proof, I sent it to my friend Eric Kroll. Eric knows more about the history of erotic photography than just about anyone, and he sent back a terrific piece of writing.
Problem was, the book was already designed.
So Eric’s contribution became an addendum. I letterpress-printed 100 copies, then drove down to Tucson, where Eric and I had lunch and he signed (and I numbered) every one.
Eric had titled his piece Early Girlie!
So, sure. Kroll landed the title.
The “Restricted to Adults” belly band came next, inspired partly by the famous WARNING band on the first edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and partly by those wonderfully ominous warnings early publishers of adult material used in an effort to keep themselves out of trouble.
The funny thing is that these photographs are incredibly tame by today’s standards. That’s part of their charm.
Finally, I needed something sturdy to house the finished book. I found heavy cardboard mailers originally intended for shipping a single DVD. Early Girlie! fit perfectly.
But I couldn’t leave them blank.
So I went back to the era of the slides—to Titter, Wink, Beauty Parade and the other men’s magazines where photographs like these were advertised. I found an original mail-order advertisement for “Color Slides – Studies in Beauty,” scanned it, turned it into a PDF, and had a rubber stamp made from it.
Then I hand-stamped all 100 envelopes.
A forgotten yellow Kodak box marked “Raymound,” and destined for the trash before a picker got it; one unexpected glimpse of Bettie Page in the Southern California sun, ten years on a shelf, twenty-four photographs, a road trip to Tucson, a Vandercook SP-15, Eric Kroll, Henry Miller, an old men’s magazine advertisement and 100 rubber-stamped envelopes later…
