Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
The March 1959 issue of Playboy featuring Audrey Daston as the centerfold is a primary document of one of the most culturally significant and historically consequential publications in the history of American magazines — and it arrives at a specific moment in that publication's early history that serious collectors will immediately recognize as important. By March 1959, Playboy had been publishing for just over five years, having launched in December 1953 with Hugh Hefner's famous first issue featuring Marilyn Monroe. In those five years, it had transformed from a gamble financed on borrowed money into one of the fastest-growing magazines in American publishing history, and its cultural impact — on American attitudes toward sexuality, masculinity, consumer culture, and the relationship between serious intellectual content and frank engagement with human desire — was already far beyond what its circulation numbers alone would suggest. The magazine was, by 1959, not merely a men's magazine but a genuine cultural phenomenon: a publication that was simultaneously debated in university philosophy departments, denounced from pulpits, celebrated by a generation of young American men who found in its pages a vision of adult life that felt genuinely modern, and studied by sociologists and cultural critics who recognized that it was doing something new and important in the American cultural landscape. For collectors building around vintage Playboy issues from the magazine's foundational decade, March 1959 represents the publication operating at the height of its early creative and cultural ambition.
The late 1950s context gives this issue a richness that extends well beyond its status as a collectible magazine. March 1959 sits at one of the more interesting cultural junctures of the postwar period — the final years of the Eisenhower era, when the surface conformity and suburban prosperity of 1950s America were beginning to show the strains that would produce the upheavals of the following decade. The Beat Generation was at its cultural peak, with Kerouac's On the Road having been published in 1957 and Allen Ginsberg's Howl having survived its 1957 obscenity trial to become one of the defining literary events of the decade. Jazz was evolving rapidly through the innovations of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Dave Brubeck. Hollywood was producing some of its most sophisticated and adult films under the pressure of television competition and the gradual relaxation of Production Code restrictions. And Playboy was, in the midst of all of this, making the argument that a sophisticated American man could hold in his hands simultaneously a frank photographic celebration of the female body and a short story by a major literary figure, an interview with a significant intellectual, and a serious assessment of jazz or film or architecture — that sophistication and desire were not opposites but natural companions. That argument, made month after month through issues like this March 1959 edition, was one of the genuinely influential editorial propositions of American magazine history. For collectors focused on magazines from 1959, this issue documents that proposition at a moment of particular creative confidence and cultural vitality.
Audrey Daston's role as the March 1959 centerfold places her within the specific history of Playboy's Playmate tradition, which by 1959 had become one of the most recognized and discussed features in American magazine publishing. The centerfold format — a full-page gatefold photograph accompanied by a brief biographical profile — had been a fixture of the magazine since its earliest issues, and the women who appeared in that role occupied a specific and historically interesting position in American popular culture: simultaneously celebrated and controversial, symbols of a sexual openness that was both attractive and threatening to different segments of American society, and figures whose appearances in the magazine were cultural events of a kind that no other American publication was producing in quite the same way. The confirmation in the listing that the centerfold remains securely attached is a meaningful condition detail for collectors of this period of the magazine's run, as centerfolds in issues of this age were frequently removed by original readers, making intact-centerfold copies a meaningfully smaller subset of all surviving examples from the late 1950s.
About the Publication
Playboy was founded by Hugh Hefner and launched in December 1953 with financing that included a $1,000 personal loan and money raised from a small group of investors, initially produced out of Hefner's Chicago apartment with no certainty that a second issue would follow the first. It quickly established itself as one of the most commercially successful and culturally significant magazine launches in American publishing history, reaching a circulation of one million copies per month by 1959 and attracting editorial contributions from some of the most distinguished writers, intellectuals, and cultural figures of the era. Its format combined the centerfold photography that became its most discussed feature with fiction, interviews, cultural criticism, and lifestyle content — jazz reviews, advice on wine and food, coverage of design and architecture — that was consistently of a quality that belied the magazine's reputation among critics who had not actually read it. By the late 1950s, Playboy had published fiction and nonfiction by contributors including Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, and P.G. Wodehouse, and its interviews had become one of the most respected long-form conversation formats in American journalism. The magazine's Chicago headquarters and the Playboy Mansion that Hefner established in 1959 — the same year as this issue — became cultural landmarks of the era, and the Playboy brand extended into clubs, television, and a range of lifestyle products that made it one of the most recognizable media entities in the world by the early 1960s. A late 1950s issue represents the magazine in the formative period when all of that was being built and when its editorial identity was at its most genuinely ambitious and intellectually engaged.
Key Highlights Inside
- Audrey Daston centerfold, confirmed intact and attached: The March 1959 centerfold featuring Audrey Daston is the defining collectible feature of this issue, and the confirmation that it remains securely attached is a significant condition distinction for a sixty-six-year-old magazine whose centerfolds were frequently removed by original readers. An intact centerfold in a late 1950s Playboy represents a meaningfully more complete artifact than issues from which this feature has been separated.
- Late 1950s fiction and literary content: By March 1959, Playboy's fiction program was well established as one of the most serious and well-compensated short fiction markets in American publishing, attracting contributions from major literary figures who recognized both the magazine's reach and its genuine editorial commitment to quality fiction. Issues from this period reliably include short fiction of a caliber that distinguished Playboy from all of its competitors in the men's magazine category.
- Jazz, film, and cultural criticism consistent with the late 1950s editorial identity: The cultural coverage in a March 1959 Playboy would have reflected the specific aesthetic preoccupations of the magazine's late-1950s editorial voice — jazz criticism at a moment when the music was undergoing its most rapid and significant evolution since bebop, film coverage reflecting the golden age of American and European cinema that the late 1950s represented, and the design and lifestyle content that gave the magazine its aspirational masculine identity.
- Advertising as primary historical document: The advertising carried in a March 1959 Playboy — liquor brands, hi-fi equipment, men's clothing, sports cars, and the full range of products marketed to the magazine's specifically defined young male readership — constitutes primary historical material of considerable interest, offering a detailed picture of the consumer aspirations and lifestyle identity that the magazine was both reflecting and actively constructing for its audience in the final years of the 1950s.
- Note: Specific interior articles, fiction titles, named contributors, and individual editorial features for this issue have not been confirmed from available listing details beyond the Audrey Daston centerfold. The above reflects what is verifiable from the centerfold subject, publication date, and the well-documented editorial practices of Playboy Magazine during its late-1950s foundational period.
Condition & Rarity
A sixty-six-year-old issue of Playboy described as being in great condition for its age, with the centerfold intact and attached, represents a genuinely strong result in the collector market for late-1950s issues of the magazine, and the specific combination of condition attributes described places it in the upper tier of what typically survives from this period of the publication's run. Playboy in 1959 was printed on paper stock of reasonable quality for a mass-market monthly magazine, but it was never produced with archival preservation in mind, and the passage of more than six decades inevitably produces the paper toning, edge softening, and general age patina that collectors of this era's periodicals expect and accept as the honest marks of survival. The most significant condition attribute for any surviving copy of a late-1950s Playboy is centerfold integrity — the confirmation that the gatefold remains attached and complete rather than having been removed, as was extremely common with issues that were read and handled by their original owners. A copy retaining its intact centerfold represents a more complete historical artifact than the majority of surviving examples from this period, and for collectors focused on the completeness of the document rather than merely its cover, this attribute is decisive. The absence of a mailing label preserves the full visual integrity of the cover, distinguishing this newsstand copy from subscriber copies whose label adhesive frequently caused permanent damage to the cover surface. The protective plastic covering provides the appropriate preservation format for a publication of this age and significance, protecting against further handling abrasion and the environmental factors that accelerate paper deterioration in unenclosed storage.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
A March 1959 Playboy with the centerfold intact, no label damage, and good overall condition for its age is among the more complete and collector-ready examples of a late-1950s issue that the market regularly produces — the combination of intact centerfold, clean cover, and the specific historical moment of the magazine's early creative peak makes it a meaningful find for serious collectors of the publication's foundational decade. If this particular issue has already been claimed, the broader Playboy Magazine collection at OriginalMagazines.com spans the publication's remarkable run from its 1953 launch through its decades of cultural dominance and regularly includes issues from the late 1950s and early 1960s that document the magazine's editorial identity at its most ambitious, intellectually engaged, and historically consequential. Collectors with a specific focus on the cultural atmosphere of the late Eisenhower era — a period of surface conformity and deep creative ferment that produced some of the most interesting American popular culture of the entire postwar period — will also find the 1959 magazine archive a rich source of primary material from across the major American publications of a year that was, in retrospect, one of the last before the 1960s transformed everything.