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there's something about Playmates that fascinates people. First, they're naked. Second, the centerfold has been a symbol of America's sexual appetites and curiosities from Playboy's first issue in 1953. When I started working at Playboy, I didn't know much about the pin-ups except the deep impression they made on me as a teenager. I've since learned that you can never know too much about Playmates, sociologically speaking.

Did I mention that they're all naked?

For the past three years, I've been interviewing Playmates and writing the overlooked but extremely clever text and captions that accompanies their pictorials. The challenge of interviewing Playmates is that all you really know about them is (1) they're gorgeous and (2) they were recently nude.

Oddly enough, I discovered that Playboy had never assembled everything it knows about the Playmates -- including hundreds of questionnaires the women fill out -- in one place. And so when Hugh Hefner mentioned he wanted a chapter of trivia in "The Playmate Book," a coffee-table volume that includes photographs and updates about each of the first 517 centerfolds, I jumped at the chance to process this enormous accumulation of raw data.

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