Male Annual

It;s a bit different from the sort of annuals I used to get for Christmas when I was a kid - the TV21 Annual never had a cover like that, for sure.  The Male Annual was published for several years in the sixties, seventies and eighties, as a supplement to the monthly men's magazine Male, printing original material.  Despite being labelled an 'annual', throughout the seventies it usually published twice a year, (sometimes supplemented by a 'Best of' compilation of the monthly magazine comprised of reprints from that year).  This is the second 1975 issue, published at a time when the monthly magazine was transitioning from being a traditional men's magazine to a full on sex-orientated publication with lots of nude pin ups.  Consequently, this is the last issue of the annual featuring stories like 'Meet a Real "Death Wish" Vigilante' or 'The King of Sex Slavers Wore Pink Panties'.  (Actually, I'm told that guys who are on the road a lot favour women's underwear as they are easier to wash in an hotel room basin and dry quickly.  Apparently Cary Grant swore by them).  The shift in content, however, is evident in such things as the 'Sex in the USA' special section and story titles like 'The Bordello Hall of Fame' and 'Nymphomaniacs, Love Foods, Breasts, Pornography, Perversions'.  Whereas the content in traditional men's magazines merely titillated, with suggestive titles, now the emphasis on sex was blatant and obvious.  

This transition in content was deemed necessary for survival by many of the remaining men's magazines  as the seventies wore on.  TV and comic books increasingly provided the kind of cheap thrills previously provided by the fake 'true' stories in the magazines, while low budget movies were becoming ever more explicit in their depictions of sex and violence.  By the middle of 1976 the parent monthly version of Male had completed its move to more soft core content, with the May issue featuring, for the first time, a fully bared breast.  The change allowed the magazine to carry on publication into the early eighties - thirty years after its first appearance in mid-1951.  Male went onto a monthly publication schedule in 1953, which it maintained until the late seventies, when it began to falter, making it one of the longest running and regular of the men's magazines. The Male Annual first appeared in 1963, running until 1977, (there was a 'Best of' compilation in 1979).  It seems to have started putting out multiple issues each year in 1970, with the numbering system indicating that there might have been as many as four issues that year (making it a quarterly rather than an annual).  The numbering of the issues was suspect, though, with the first 1971 issue being numbered 'six', despite the previous annual having been 'eleven' and the next 'thirteen', so there could well have been only two issues in 1970, ('eight' and 'eleven').  Whatever the vagaries of the numbering system, Male Annual had a remarkably consistent run for over ten years.