Sexpots for the Summer

Stacked Decks: The Art and History of Erotic Playing Cards and
Private Stash: A Pin-Up Portfolio By 20 Cartoonists

Ever since early pornographers dubbed nude snapshots of big-bosomed women with lustful looks “art photography,” Americans have practiced the sly alchemy of transforming sleaze into something a little bit classier. The most recent examples of this esteemed tradition are the Rotenberg Collection’s Stacked Decks: The Art and History of Erotic Playing Cards (Quirk Books, $24.95) and Private Stash: A Pin-Up Portfolio by 20 Cartoonists (Buenaventura Press, $24.95).

Stacked Decks is, above all, a book filled with naughty images. That the images happen to adorn playing cards is, in the end, inconsequential. Playing cards, when you get right down to it, are cardboard rectangles, and not very different from what most naughty images adorn (magazine pages, calendars, postcards).

The playing cards span from the mid-1800s through the 1970s, and though there are a few interesting designs — a deck that makes use of the traditional mirror imagery to produce orgy-like results — the book falls short of its promise to “offer a fascinating window into society’s ever-changing views of female beauty.”

For the most part, the pictures are standard-issue cheesecake, and the change they illustrate is a story already familiar to us: in the ’60s there are a lot of women on animal skins, whereas in the ’70s there are a lot of naturalistic outdoor shots and the first tan lines make their appearance. Big boobs are always in, although the percentage of body weight for which they account increases by decade.

Stacked Decks describes itself as “the perfect gift for fans of poker, magic, nostalgia, and vintage erotica,” which, with the exception of magic, is probably true. I can’t see someone who actually uses nudie playing cards (still a booming industry today) reading this book or vice versa.

Rather than paying homage to the past via reproductions of old erotica, Private Stash offers a reinterpretation of the pin-up. The accordion fold-out book includes twenty drawings by twenty different cartoonists, among them R. Crum, Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomic, and Rick Altergott. The drawings range from a quiet and meditative picture of a woman slowly removing her socks (shown left) to playful reproductions of traditional pin-ups and horror movie mock-ups.

Though the drawings are imaginative, entertaining, and, as cartoon fans will be excited to know, exclusive to this book, Private Stash contains far too few of them — a scant twenty pictures and no text. The courage of authors and publishers to create books that don’t fit a standard size or format is admirable, and in that regard Private Stash is a brave little book, but sometimes you want more bang for your buck.

– Kim Velsey

Stacked Decks: The Art and History of Erotic Playing Cards
The Rotenberg Collection
Hardcover, 192 pages
$24.95, Quirk Books
www.quirkbooks.com

Private Stash: A Pin-Up Portfolio by 20 Cartoonists
Various Artists
Paperback, 20 pages
$24.95, Buenaventura Press
www.buenaventurapress.com