Men Only
British glamour magazine
Men Only is a British magazine title that originated in 1935 as a pocket-sized men's magazine. It became a standard-sized pin-up magazine in the 1950s and was relaunched in 1971 by Paul Raymond Publications as a soft-core pornographic magazine.
Publication history
1935–1965: Pearson
Men Only was founded in 1935 by C. Arthur Pearson Ltd (at that point an imprint of George Newnes Ltd) as a pocket magazine (4½" x 6½"; 115×165 mm). It set out its editorial stall in the first issue: "We don't want women readers. We won't have women readers...." It sought "bright articles on current male topics."
Humour was at the heart of the title, though from the start it carried fiction (including by P. G. Wodehouse), wide-ranging articles, and plates of "art" nudes. Covers were initially text-only, then carried caricatures of famous people until mid-1958, when photographic covers took over; photographers included John Everard and Joan Craven. It published colour illustrations of models by artists such as Archie Dickens, Blas Gallego, David Wright, and Vargas (as published in Esquire in the US), on a page labelled Let's Join the Ladies. Cartoons were by illustrators such as Belsky, Antonia Yeoman, Carl Giles, Frank Hoar, Keith Waite, and Bernard Hollowood.
When Pearson closed The Strand Magazine in 1950, it was castigated by The Economist for concentrating its resources on London Opinion and Men Only. Men Only had coloured frontispieces and rather trivial main pages.
“Men Only” enters the record as british glamour magazine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Only, British and glamour can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Men Only” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Only, British and glamour provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6816219. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 1971, 1965 and 1958.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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This entry incorporates text from “Men Only” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.