'The World's Toughest Job!'

Blue Book was an extremely long lived US magazine, running from 1905 to 1975.   A contemporary of Argosy, it followed a similar trajectory.  Originally aimed at both male and female readers, over time the focus shifted to more male-orientated stories and, by the sixties, it was a full-fledged men's adventure magazine.  With its title amended to Blue Book For Men, it featured garish covers and adrenaline fueled war stories.  This edition, from June 1953, just predates that era, with the magazine still featuring a wider range of adventure-based fact and fiction - less war, more battling the elements underwater or in the jungle.  Underwater treasure hunting of the sort featured in the cover painting was a perennial theme in these magazines during the fifties - deep sea diving seemed to represent some new wild and unexplored frontier where men could test themselves.

I have to admit, that when I was a kid, those deep sea diver outfits used to fascinate me, to the point of obsession.  I think it was the fact that, on the one hand the looked so antiquated, yet at the same time were still in use during the seventies, (when I was a child).  Indeed, apart from the fact that they had switched from having their air supply pumped by hand to having it mechanically pumped, the suits hadn't changed that much.  Actually, it was that dependence upon a flimsy air pipe snaking upward to a ship, or the shore, which was one of the primary points of fascination for the young me.  It just seemed so precarious compared to the aqualungs used by skin divers, which at least gave them some control over their own air supply - the deep sea diver had trust others way up on the surface to keep him supplied with air.  Such was my fascination that I even had a deep sea diving suit for my 'Action Man', (which was incredibly difficult to put together as it replicated all the major parts of the real thing: internal and external neck plates, for instance, which the helmet screwed on to in order to form a seal).  

Anyway, this is a pretty typical Blue Book cover for the era.  It's interesting to note the above title flyer about 'Fabulous Opportunities in Canada's Modern Boom Towns!'  Some things, it seems, never change - I still get shown ads online extolling the virtues of emigrating to Canada.  I guess they still need people.  But I can't say that it has ever really appealed to me.