Paul Anderson - Be the mighty tub of goo you always imagined.

Aah, the bodybuilding ad. They'll never become obsolete. Any magazine with an even slightly technical theme will have lots of ads selling muscle programs and boner pills. Try this: choose any TV show or printed publication and look at their ads, keeping a mental list as you go. This will give you a clear picture of who the producers / publishers think you are. It's hilarious and not a little insulting. Advertisements want to make you the person they think you're not.

Here we see an ad from the December 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. "Mech Ill" is great for crappy ads, because it's the poor man's Popular Mechanics. As a result, the advertisers are the bottom feeders who wouldn't pony up the dough to appear in the last 50 pages of "Pop Mech" (as we call it in the biz, which means "the business", which is what we call it when we're in the biz, which I'm not.)

Paul Anderson was the world's strongest man, as published in the Guiness Book of Unverifiable Claims and Irrational Declarations (ISBN 464415, extra sloppy 1957 edition with no big words). After his hernia in 1961, Anderson was then demoted by the Guinness organization to World's Most John Belushi-like Man, Whoever That Is, as John Belushi was alive at the time, but was only twelve, and wouldn't become a famous slob until the mid seventies.

So meanwhile, the world had Paul Anderson. He wrote a book showing you how to look like him. I don't think I'd need a whole book to tell you that:
1-Eat Until you're exhausted. 2-Rest. 3-Continue eating. 4-Repeat until death.

Conversely, the steps to becoming trim and healthy are as follows: 1-Eat fewer calories. 2-Eat better food. 3-Do something physically difficult for a while a few times a week. Anyone not trying to sell you a book (or duped by someone selling them a book) will tell you the same thing. You're welcome. The part that fills up a book is the part about convincing yourself to keep doing these things.

Many big people have muscles of steel beneath all that extra weight. Carrying around an extra 80 pounds all day would tend to make one kind of strong. Many big people are perfectly healthy, so long as they look after their heart and blood pressure, etc. What makes Anderson so easy to laugh at is that he's holding himself up as a model for other men. He may have a lot of muscle, but he's got at least as much fat, too.

Mr. Anderson probably wrote the copy in his ad all by himself. Does it look like he hired an editor? "BIG BOOK FREE - WRITE TODAY". You see what he's done there? He's explained that A) There is a book, and B) the book is big. Therefore C) you should write today to get a copy. Bulletproof logic like that could easily be "BIG CAKE GOOD - EAT NOW!", and by the looks of him, this is a philosophy vigorously embrached by Anderson. Hell, if the book were full of deft syllogisms like that, you're damn right I'd buy it!