Strip tease dancers have a special place in the sexual fantasies of American males. Here are attractive young women willing to take off their clothes for you. Men are very familiar with the tease part, but the women on these covers don't stop there. They are not shy or ashamed but sexually brazen. We don't want to marry them but....! They fall into that category of 'bad girls', which starts with those adolescent Gang Girls, moves on to the showy Carnival Girls, then to the the Strippers, and finally to the Call Girls.
In Vintage Paperback art, most strippers are wholesome, innocent looking girls who are just having fun and showing off for a group of great young guys. The sleaze publishers showed a bit more of the hard edge but most of these never made it into the open racks on the news-stand. Here are a few of my favorites:

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		Here is a great example of the innocent girl stripping for a few drunks who are trying to pull her dress off. Everybody is just having fun, including the about to be naked girl. I guess these were more innocent times. This cover is by the great Earle Bergey who was best known for his brass brassiere science fiction pulp covers.
		This unusual, almost matching covers, are much less subtle and come from one of the Sleaze houses. No innocence here. The blurb on one cover speaks to the 1950's male fantasy that women strippers (and by extension, all women) want to be raped and like it. The sleaze publishers were quite crude but it is where many of men's ideas about women came from.
		Strip Street has a great Rudi Nappi cover which intimates that any ordinary guy (you!) can walk into the dressing room and have the attention of these lovely and available women. If this cover were done 20 years later, a couple of these women would probably be naked or at least topless. Remember this was the 50's.
		Not really a stripper but what a great cover!
		The cover for Strip Artist is unusual in that it is much more stylized than what you will find with most Sleaze publishers (which Playtime certainly was) of the time. The 60s were a time of change where realism gave way to psychadelasized art - blue women with yellow and green hair. The blurb speaks to another male fantasy that women like to be naked (attractive women, that is!)
		And then there's Bill Wenzel. To see more of his work, go to the Bill Wenzel page.

Here you'll find a few more from both the innocent and the not so innocent camps:

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