Playboy Cover to Cover: The 50s. We all know that it was the interviews, cartoons, and Leonard Feather jazz reviews that made Playboy magazine an enormously influential cultural artifact of the 20th century. So those of you who have a purely historical interest in the magazine will love Bondi Digital Publishing's Playboy Cover to Cover: The 50s, a two-disc set that contains a searchable database of every page of every issue published from 1953 through 1959 (later decades to be released next year).
The image quality of the scanned pages is impeccable, but the nicest thing about the package is Bondi's proprietary Reader program. Despite a few notable failings in the current rev, such as the inability to sort search results by column, the Bondi Reader is arguably the easiest to use and most flexible interface I've seen--strong words for a market quickly glutting with "cover-to-cover" DVD-ROM reproductions of everything from National Lampoon to Spider-Man.
If all that isn't enough, this sumptuous slip-cased package also includes an oversize coffee-table trade paperback edited by the Hef himself, and an excruciatingly authentic printed reproduction of Playboy's very first (and, um, admittedly kinda porn-like) December 1953 issue.
Playboy Cover to Cover is shipping now and lists for a hundred bucks. It's certainly not for everyone, but if the kind of man who reads Playboy is on your holiday gift list, it would make a pretty classy present.