Francis Smith, better known as Smilby, is a fastidious and talented English cartoonist whose work has appeared in Playboy for many years. When he is not at the drawing board, he is out collecting vintage cover girls. Playboy Press has recently published Stolen Sweets (named for a magazine of the Thirties), a loving look at Smilby's collection. Smilby writes, "The aim of this book is to share my interest and pleasure in the drawings of the cover girls of what, for want of a better name, one must call the girlie magazines of the first third of this century. For this was their heyday---the days from the turn of the century until the mid-Thirties, when photoprinting in color finally became technically good enough for the photograph to replace the drawing. ... These paintings are as fresh. as lively and lovely as the day they were painted."
During the Depression of the Thirties. America had the greatest cheap-magazine industry in the world. We took the notion of the French girlie magazine and gave it a unique twist. Smilby writes, "For if France had invented l'amour, America had invented glamor---one of the two curiously opposed images that she created and contributed to the girlie world. The first of these, the polished beauty, all flaws retouched, was the glamorous, unattainable movie-star dream girl. And the second---the one so often revealed in this book---the cheerful, happy-go-lucky, fun-loving girl next door. ... The fundamental difference between the French and the American girl in this genre can be summed up by one broad generalization: The sophisticated Frenchwoman is consciously pleasing, whereas the great American invention, the girl next door, is unconsciously pleasing. ... [These girls] positively glow with rosy-cheeked extroverted normality. They swim, they dive, they roller-skate, they throw balls. They're, active, athletic, bursting with enthusiasm and those old American virtues---vim. vigor and vitality. Real get-up-and-go girls. ... When popular art, for whatever reason, is at a high level of achievement, the cheap and vulgar can be lifted above itself. Good artists can lift a tawdry product to a level where some degree of critical appreciation is possible." It is nice--- for Smilby and for us---to be able to pay respects to our roots.
