Open your notebooks, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for a history lesson like none you’ve ever experienced. You’re about to learn everything you could ever want to know about the world history of men’s magazines—not magazines about sports, not fashion, not hunting or fishing or how to build a birdhouse in ten easy steps, but those titillating periodicals embracing the subject dearest to all heterosexual men’s hearts and other body parts: the undraped female form. Former men’s magazine editor Dian Hanson traces its development from 1900 to 1980 in six massive and informative volumes.

Volume 6, the final word in this encyclopedic series, is reserved for the most daring and extreme edges of the publishing field. In the late 1960s adult bookstores and sex shops spread across Northern Europe and North America to house an increasingly explicit crop of magazines resulting from the international sexual revolution. Magazines sold on the newsstand had to conform to mass taste and morality, but in the sex shops the only limits were imagination. In the 1970s, drunk on freedom, editor’s imaginations ran wild. Come peek inside the sex shops of Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Holland and the US to see what liberation really meant. Read about Berth Milton, the man who toppled Sweden’s obscenity laws with his magazine Private; the Danish Theander brothers whose motto was, "The First, The Biggest, The Most Pornographic"; Reuben Sturman, founding father of Southern California’s vast sex industry; John Sutcliffe, who made gasmasks sexy with his Atomage magazine; and worst film director Ed Wood Jr.’s secret and surprising men’s magazines.

Volume 6: 1970s Under the Counter contains 460 full color pages of covers and magazine interiors and 18 chapters of information-rich text. Together with Volume 5 it forms a complete overview of men’s magazine publishing of the 1970s. With Volumes 1 through 4, these two books complete the six-volume set of Dian Hanson’s: The History of Men’s Magazines.