eBay Highlights: The Mystery of Grand Hotel

eBay listing

I love kitsch. In fact, I would describe this entire blog as a love letter to kitsch. The kitschier the better. I love pin-ups and roadside attractions and cheesy throwbacks to things I didn't get to experience. (I am living proof that youth is wasted on the young.) So when I find something as kitschy as vintage issues of Grand Hotel, I want to know everything about it. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of information. Which is why I am dedicating this post to The Mystery of Grand Hotel. (Which sounds like a Nancy Drew novel...another kitschy thing I love.)

I first encountered Grand Hotel while looking for vintage fashion magazines on the Italian eBay site. There were magazines like Grazia and...Grazia, but Grand Hotel instantly caught my attention with its insane cover illustrations. (Click for details, obviously. The links are to the eBay listings and go from left to right. All the covers are from the 1950s to 1962.)

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I've seen a lot of pulp. I used to hang around the vintage perv Tumblrs (you know the ones), but I'd never seen anything like this. First of all, I couldn't figure out what audience the publishers had targeted. Nearly all the men in the illustrations seem vaguely predatory, if not outright terrifying (hello 7). So if the magazine was targeted towards women, were the messages of submissiveness that overt? Was it specific to Italy or the Mediterranean? And if the magazine was directed towards men–whoa, I know about machismo, but the illustrations seem to take it a bit far!

On the other hand, other covers from the same period seem to be pretty pedestrian. Or about as pedestrian as you can get with a donkey-cart.

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I did a bit of investigation and discovered Grand Hotel was first published in 1946. I'm still not 100% sure if it started off as a fotoromanzi or if it evolved to be one, but the brothers behind it got their start in comics if Google Translate is correct, so pairing illustrations–and later photos–with text probably seemed pretty natural. I don't have any covers from 1946, but there are a few currently on eBay.

By the mid-60s the covers started to be less creepy (though the baby doll in 2 and the cover-within-a-cover on 4 aren't helping):

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But I wouldn't say it went away entirely (I have to admit my mistake here:  I thought the girl in the middle had just seen like, a dead body, but nope:  she's just reading "Carlo ama la Giovanna". Her adorable sweater-dress reads Luisa, just to drive the point home). I'm mega-creeped out by the images on the left and right:

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By the 1970s it seems to have evolved into a fotoromanzi-gossip mag, though issues occasionally contained knitting/crochet patterns, horoscopes, and puppies. Do you recognize any celebrities? (Is that John Kerry?)

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These days Grand Hotel is essentially a gossip magazine, which you can subscribe to here.

If you want more information, there's an excellent (and much more informed!) write-up from Niamh Cullen here. Italian Ways also has a small selection of photos featuring moda e motori, and Salon has a general article on fumetti.

What do you think about Grand Hotel? Have you ever read an issue? Do you think social history is an important realm of study, or are comic books and other ephemera best forgotten? 

XOXO,

Annie Belle