One man's wild roller-coaster ride, a personal story about working in the men's magazine publishing business from the late 1960s through the '80s. In on the founding of Hustler magazine in a vacated Chicago whorehouse, through the event of one of his publishers being shot dead by the Chicago Police in a hostage situation -- an event that led him up the Magnificent Mile to a decade-long staff position in the art department of Playboy magazine. These are stories of drug-fueled parties, Chicago Outfit henchmen -- hit men, corrupt cops, pimps and prostitutes and meeting deadlines. Arriving at Playboy he joins a magazine on the cusp between the unchecked indulgences of the early years at the Big Bunny to more ridged corporate structure as the magazine's assets and circulation crumbled away. There he found himself in the company of not so much an art department as a contingent of wild-eyed dipsomaniacal Merchant Marines. Illustrating "Steal this Book" for Abbie Hoffman, smoking dope with mythic porn star, Harry Reems, at Hef's Playboy mansion, office sex, a disastrous week-long assignment with Deborah Harry and the band Blondie in Texas, adventures in the narco-sexual punk rock underbelly in New York City during the mid seventies, a deep friendship with Shel Silverstein and much more. This is the real story, unglossed, from the inside out.
Skip Williamson in a internationally recognized artist, cartoonist designer and writer, who along with Robert Crumb and Jay Lynch helped launch the underground comix movement in 1968. As a artist his work has his work has been exhibited in galleries around the world including the New York Cultural Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), The Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate Gallery of Modern Art (London). He has received numerous awards for design excellence including the Gold Award from the Art Director's Club of New York, and a Silver award from the Society of Illustrators.
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