My Vintage Playboy Collection was over 250 issues of Playboy going back to 1974 — six banker's boxes of them — won by accident with a junk bid on a 📝MaxSold estate auction in January 2026. Roughly fifteen issues remain. The rest was given away in a single night.
The original plan was small and slow: gift friends the issue from their birth month and year, one birthday at a time. Then the lot arrived. The auction had listed it at roughly 100 issues and it turned out to be more than 250 — at that volume, one-gift-at-a-time arithmetic meant storing banker's boxes for a decade. So the plan inverted. Rather than distribute the collection over years, distribute it in a single night, and make that night a birthday theme. The 📝Playboy Perusing Potluck Party, my 39th birthday, exists because the collection was too large to give away politely.
All six boxes are accounted for. Four went home with guests at the potluck. A fifth — the 1980s issues — was claimed whole by a guest who wanted them as atmosphere for a play party. The sixth was cut apart into the 📝Playboy Collage. What survives is about fifteen issues held back from the scissors: the oldest and the strangest, kept because they were too interesting to cut up.
A mislisted auction lot is the whole story here. Every good thing that came out of this — the party, the art, the underwear on the frame — traces back to a listing error and a bid I never expected to win. The collection was worth more as material than as archive: better dispersed among friends and cut into a collage than sitting whole in a garage as a slow gifting project I would never have finished. Fifteen issues is the right size for a collection. Two hundred and fifty was an inventory problem.