Average Reviews:
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Dian Hanson was the obvious choice to compile this huge leg book. She edited the very successful Leg Show magazine for a number of years and clearly knows everything from the toes to the top of the hose (to quote her friend Elmer Batters). The book follows sexy legs through the decades from the twenties to the sixties, mostly with photos but Hanson contributes text dealing with: cancan; flappers; Betty Grable; Nylons and WW2; Bettie Page; Elmer Batters; high heel history and the last chapter on toes. There is nothing particularly new in the text and the references to personalities and magazines are fully covered in Hanson's six-volume `History of Men's Magazines', also from Taschen.
The sixties were the great years for male connoisseurs of leg photos and thankfully the book does rather concentrate on those photographically with plenty from ace leg snapper Batters. Dian sums it up as...`a golden age of glossy nylons, stiletto heels, towering bouffants, black patent eyeliner, cigarettes dangling from thickly painted lips, martini glasses clutched by long red nails, and attitude oozing from every pore'. Fans of the genre will enjoy page after page of these hard-edged chicks that are clearly not in the Playboy girl-next-door mold.
The book's production is up to the usual Taschen standards: super design; quality paper; the four hundred plus photos are well printed (with 200dpi) though it occurred to me that many of the photos seemed untrimmed but I guess this would be a minor detail for readers.
`The Big Book of Legs' is the third body-parts title from Hanson and Taschen, after the Big Penis and Big Breasts I wonder what zone will be next?
***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.
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The female leg is a sexual oddity. Its non-genital, nearly identical in structure to the corresponding male body part, and there is no obvious reason why it should be eroticized. Yet, through much of history, across many cultures, the female leg was hidden from sight and treated as such a taboo topic that it became an object of intense sexual obsession. In the Victorian era, the word leg was so forbidden that it couldnt be uttered in polite society. Even now, 80 years after women legs came out of hiding, their allure remains strong. In this third book of Dian Hanson wildly successful body parts series, she explores how freeing the female leg became central to women liberation, beginning with the French Revolution and ending with the sexual revolution. Learn who wore the first high heels, how nylons became a weapon of war, why Betty Grable were the million dollar legs, while enjoying great vintage photos by Irving Klaw Batters, and other great masters of leg art.
