The pin-up girl is one of the oldest of human artistic expressions. Possibly, the oldest. The first representations of the human form are those of naked ladies--the usually tiny Venus figures carved from antler, ivory, and stone and found all over Europe and parts of the Middle East were made before recorded history began. The art form has been with us ever since and had quite a blossoming during the first half of the 20th century with artists like Petty and Vargas--and Gil Elvgren.

This set of thirty post cards is a spectrum of the images he did from the 30s to the 60s, many of the more decorous ones as part of ad campaigns for the likes of Coca Cola, Ovaltine, and Pangburn's Chocolates. Plenty of his more daring ladies wound up stenciled on the noses of fighter aircraft during WWII, and this repro collection of postcards by the German publishing house of TASCHEN is a tasty sampler of his work. The documentation inside the folder cover is in English, German, and Spanish--a testament to the endless appeal, from Goya's Majas to the underground art of the 60s, of the pin-up.