Bob Mizer / Tom of Finland — Physique Pictorial, vol. 16, no. 2 (Tom of Finland cover) (1967)

• Published: Athletic Model Guild, Los Angeles, 1967
• Contributors: Edited by Bob Mizer
• Edition: Original issue
• Binding: Stapled pictorial wraps (digest)
• Dimensions: 14 x 21.5 cm (5½ x 8½ in)
• Language: English
• Condition: Good.

Bob Mizer founded Physique Pictorial in Los Angeles in 1951 as a catalogue for the Athletic Model Guild, his studio of bodybuilders and drifters photographed in posing straps. Presented as a fitness magazine, and sold on newsstands when gay publishing was policed as obscenity, it became one of the foundations of postwar gay visual culture.

It was Mizer who first published Touko Laaksonen, on the cover of the spring 1957 issue, and who gave him the name Tom of Finland. This issue from the 1960s carries one of Tom's drawings on its cover, a reminder that his work reached its first American audience in these small digests.