Robert Harrison (publisher) - Harrison's Early Publications

Harrison's Early Publications

During the 1940s Harrison published ”girlie magazines”, with pictures of partially clothed women. To enhance sales he used three leading pin-up artists of the time: Peter Driben, Earl Moran (aka Steffa) and Billy De Vorss.

Beauty Parade (”The World's Loveliest Girls”) was Harrison's first ”risqué” publication, started in October 1941. It contained, as the title suggests, pictures of pretty women, although not as raunchy as his later works. The magazine Eyeful (”Glorifying the American Girl”) was created in 1942 and was very similar to Beauty Parade. The depicted women were still fully, or partially, clothed but were placed in more intimate positions. Eyeful often featured Bettie Page posing on the centrefold. Wink also imitated the style of Beauty Parade, but contained a stronger element of fetishism, with women in bondage, handling whips or being spanked. In 1947 Harrison created Flirt, which mainly featured the same kind of models as Beauty Parade, but with more fetishist themes. Titter (”America's Merriest Magazine”) was another of Harrison's publications, which focused on the burlesque.

The only one of Harrison’s magazines that differed from the Beauty Parade format was Whisper, started in April 1946. The contents were more explicit, violent and blatantly sexual, and Whisper reached sales figures of 600,000 copies per issue. After Harrison had created Confidential many of Confidential's articles were reproduced in the magazine. Harrison sold Whisper in 1958, but it survived into the early 1970s.