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Most girlie magazines of the 50's and 60's were published very cheaply. The 1960's in particular saw an explosion of fly-by-night publishers who were here today and gone tomorrow. They would publish a handful of magazines, stiff the models and photographers, then open up somewhere else under a different name. On the other side were the big boys, like Playboy, Knight Publications, and Publisher's Development Corp; companies that paid their bills and tried to elevate the industry or at least give lip-service to doing so.
Somewhere in-between were publishers like Leonard Burtman.
Burtman was either in electronics or nuclear science in the 1940's, depending on who you believed, but his heart yearned for other, more personal things. Lenny had a fetish for women in leather and femdom trappings. He left California under a cloud of suspicion, involving some security exchanges, and made his way east to New York and a life as a publisher of skin mags. In particular, Mr. Burtman was interested in producing fetish magazines. His first company, Burmel, published Exotique, the granddaddy of fetish magazines. Burtman wasn't exactly a fly-by-nighter in the industry, but he was definitely producing on a shoestring. When he formed Selbee Associates, he didn't always have the money to produce all of the magazines he envisioned. Sometimes he sold packages of material to companies like Health Knowledge (a Manhattan-based publisher) in exchange for some much-needed cash. The other company (be it Consolidated, Bilife, Unique, Bizincorp, or Health Knowledge) would produce magazines under Selbee's imprints (Satana, Leg Show, Bizarre Life, Corporal, etc.), with their own names in the indicia. That's why some issues of Satana, for example, are published by Selbee and others are published by Health Knowledge.
And where does Acme fit into all of this? That's the distributor that the publishers used!
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