The Big Butt Book
Taschen, the German art book publisher, is known for its oversized coffee table books on everything from Impressionist art and modern architecture to tropical fish and sophisticated erotica.
Their newest tome, The Big Butt Book, is one of the latter, and focuses on the female rear end, offering more than 400 photographs and drawings of bottoms of all shapes and sizes. The photos are mostly classy portrait shots, usually more playful than they are technically scintillating.
The chapters of The Big Butt Book (372 pages, $59.99) are broken down into five categories: The Bountiful Buttocks, The Forties-Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies-Eighties, and 2001: An Ass Odyssey. The number of photographers taking part is almost as varied as the number of subjects daring to expose their posteriors.
The photos from the ’40s and ’50s are mostly black and white shots of women dressed in lingerie flashing their bottoms with a come-hither look. The majority of the models aren’t classically attractive, as such risque poses would have been positively scandalous at the time.
The pictures from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s are more of the same, with many more color photos of women with curvaceous backsides reclining on couches and beds, bent over tables and desks, and seductively standing in high heels.
One particularly odd and humorous photo shows a smiling naked black model holding an exploding bottle of champagne: the sparkling wine arches up over her head and into the champagne glass carefully balanced on her ample posterior.
The book was written and edited by Dian Hanson, formerly an editor for a number of men’s magazines, now in charge of Taschen’s erotic line. All of the text is provided in English, German, and French. Hanson explains that although other animals might have rear ends and hindquarters, humans are the only species with a unique, curvy, W-shaped bottom.
Hanson also reveals a 1998 study conducted by a Brazilian anthropologist who found that the #1 characteristic that sexually attracts a men to women is the butt.
In the book’s hundreds of photographs, readers can see female buttocks squishing together onto a diner stool; clad in all sorts of underpants, garters and other lingerie; tattooed; and spanked, sometimes to a painful shade of crimson.
Cartoonist Robert Crumb is also given a section in which he pays tribute to his "adolescent fantasies" of "Amazonian women with huge asses, drawn from this introverted, sexually tormented youth." Crumb explains his fascination in a humorous essay, and his outrageously proportioned cartoons are as funny as they are bizarre.
Familiar faces (and buttocks) featured in the book include Serena Williams, Josephine Baker, Mamie Van Doren, Pamela Anderson, and Ice-T’s enormously-buttocked wife, Coco, who gets 20 pages to display her wares.
Some of the odder inclusions in the book are the annual Mooning of the Trains which has takes place every July 11th in Laguna Niguel, California, during which men and women drink beer and expose their bottoms to passing Amtrak trains. The book also mentions some of the men’s magazines devoted to the female posterior, such as Fanny, Bottom, Crack, and the ever-popular Derriere.
If you or a friend of yours is an "ass man" (or ass woman) who enjoys gazing at copiously proportioned female booties, The Big Butt Book is for you. One guesses a similar tome featuring men’s bottoms, is probably not far behind.
by Dian Hanson
Publisher: Taschen. Publication Date: June 8, 2010. Pages: 372. Price: $59.99. Format: Hardcover Original. ISBN-13: 978-3-836-511-155
