Playboy Magazines Review

Sixty-seven years of a magazine, and the format is the reason to care.

iPlayboy hosts the official Playboy archive as scanned issues — every page, in sequence, the way the magazine was published. That means the fiction, the interviews, the advertising and the cartoons are all there alongside the pictorials, which is a very different object from a gallery of extracted images. Browsing is by issue and by date, so what you are navigating is a publication history rather than a tag tree.

For anyone with an interest in the magazine as a cultural artefact, that completeness is the whole value. The advertising alone is a record of six decades of consumer culture, and the interview archive contains conversations that have nothing to do with why most people arrive.

Access is a paid membership. The site is an official archive rather than a scan dump, which resolves the provenance question that hangs over most historical magazine collections online.

What it is not is a fast way to look at nudes. Scanned magazine pages are a heavier reading experience than a gallery, and if the pictorials are all you want, this is an inefficient route to them. As an archive, it is close to unimprovable.