Taschen’s soon to be released “Bob’s World: The Life and Boys of AMG’s Bob Mizer” is the first book to celebrate the full-color late-period photographs of beefcake entrepreneur Bob Mizer. Mizer, the founder of The Athletic Model Guild or AMG in 1945, is often called the Hugh Hefner of gay publishing. Pioneering the fitness and muscle genre, during the Post-war years, U.S censorship laws allowed women, but not men to appear nude in photographs and magazines, under the guise of “Art” photos. Mizer started taking pictures of men he knew, both gay and straight under the term “fitness” and “health” i.e. full frontal tips for the um err health conscious.

This wasn’t just back room, dirty old man stuff, Mizer influenced figures in art and society; David Hockney was hell bent on meeting Mizer on his first trip to America, and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, modeled for him in 1975. That’s what I call “real class”.

The book, hardly what I would call porn, is retro beefcake in all it’s wild and weird manifestations. Writer and editor, Dian Hanson (remember The Big Penis Book) put together a package containing over 250 photos, an oral history by artists David Hockney, Jack Pierson and John Sonsini, interviews with photographers David Hurles and Hal Roth, models Ben Sorensen and Andrew Sears. A one-hour DVD of Mizer films spanning 1958–1980, specially edited for this edition is also included.

INFO: Bob’s World: The Life and Boys of AMG’s Bob Mizer, Hanson, Dian (ED), Hardcover + DVD, 24.5 x 32 cm (9.6 x 12.6 in.), 288 pages, $59.99 (ISBN: 978-3-8365-1230-5), Multilingual Edition: English, French, German, Availability: September 2009