'I Found the Secret of Peru's Women Without Men'

 

One of the longest lived of all men's pulps, running from 1910 until 1970, Adventure, at the peak of its popularity in the thirties, was publishing anything up to twenty two issues a year, before settling into a monthly schedule for most of the forties and fifties.  By the time this issue was published in February 1965, it had moved to a bi-monthly schedule, which it pretty much maintained until its demise.  With its focus firmly on male orientated adventure stories, it tended to resist the trend toward overtly salacious content and lurid covers which dominated the rest of the men's pulp market.  Nonetheless, by the mid-sixties, the publishers clearly thought that even stirring tales of adventure weren't enough, on their own, to sustain sales. Hence the use of more suggestive story titles like the cover story:  'I Found the Secret of Peru's Women Without Men'.  (Masturbation springs to mind as the obvious answer).  Or gimmicks like 3-D photos of 'Your Adventure Girl'.  (3-D photos, usually of semi-clad women, had featured in meen's magazines, on both sides of the Atlantic, since the forties, at least).  Not to mention that free $5 Bonus Book: 'A Man's Guide to Lusty Women'.

The rest of the featured content, though, is still adventure orientated.  'South Sea Adventure - At Prices You Can Afford' addresses an ever-popular pulp magazine fantasy of untouched exotic South Sea islands populated by nubile native girls.  Although, surely by the mid-sixties, the South Seas must have become as much of a tourist destination as everywhere else.  'Get Lost on Ibiza -Spain's Hideaway Isle', though, reminds us that even in Europe, some destinations were still, as late as the sixties, relatively undiscovered by the tourist trade.  Nowadays, of course, Ibiza is synonymous in the popular imagination with young British clubbers, excessive drinking and controlled substances.  But this is a relatively recent development, fuelled by the advent of cheap air travel, which opened up Spain then Greece and Italy as popular tourist destinations for the British. It is also notable that the cover's flyer - offering $100 for readers' stories - tries to emphasise Adventure's distinction from other men's pulps: that its stories were 'true', rather than the entirely 'made up true stories' of competitors.  Just how many times that $100 was paid out is, however open to question.