Bettie Page, Cover Girl

The anonymous magazine, book and LP appearances of the woman who would later become a pin-up legend.

Bettie Page has been such a major cultural icon for so long now that it is hard to remember that once upon a time, she was just another glamour model, a face and body that appeared in countless magazines but remained effectively unknown outside the bondage magazine world. Like many a pin-up girl who graced the covers of men’s magazines, her name was probably familiar to connoisseurs during the 1950s but she was hardly famous in the grand scheme of things. That fame was to come long after her career ended and she began to be discovered as something special by a new generation.

Here is a collection of 1950s Bettie Page covers – photographs and illustrations for magazines, pulp novels and LPs. These are classic examples of the anonymous or barely credited appearances – often with her name misspelt – of a hard-working model and we’ve not included any of the Bettie Page specials that emerged from Irving Klaw and the like at the time or the many, many books and magazines devoted to her from the 1970s onwards. They show the many faces of an icon, some of them library shots bought from photographers with little regard for who the model was, some posed especially for the project in hand. Enjoy!