Playboy magazine collects clichés the way its centerfold models collect turn-ons and turn-offs.

The publication’s most pervasive cliché is the one most people use as way to avoid admitting that they enjoy looking at glossy photos of nude women captured in soft focus the only way a camera lens thoroughly smeared with Vaseline can. It’s also the cliché that Reddit user JJMFB417 posted about in the Shower Thoughts community in connection with the magazine announcing it will no longer be publishing those kind of nekkid pi’chers:

“I only read it for the articles.”

Remember, Playboy, once you go never nude, you never go back. (Fox)

Like all clichés, that rationalization has a strong basis in truth. Playboy has a vibrant history of publishing provocative journalism and short fiction throughout its 62-year existence. It’s comparable to the magazine’s more commonly known history of providing pictorial detail of the bathing suit areas of celebrities, models, and all those “girls next door” who have posed.

Playboy lost its writerly way in recent years, but the announcement that it’s dropping the “nudie” in “nudie mag” has some Reddit users hoping for a return to better (written) days:

If you’re not familiar with the fiction and nonfiction that has appeared in Playboy’s pages, these nine examples are just some of the works worth hunting down and checking out. Moreso than Shannen Doherty’s and LaToya Jackson’s photo shoots for the magazine.

1. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1954)

Playboy jumped feet first into the literary pool less than six months after the first issue hit the stands in October of 1953. Although Bradbury’s seminal work had already been published in book form (released the same month, coincidentally, as Playboy‘s debut), the magazine’s decision to serialize the novel over three issues was a rallying cry to readers that gentlemen don’t live on smut alone.

2. Alex Haley Interviews (1960s)

Once it established a reputation for fiction, Playboy moved to raise the bar of the celebrity interview, and Haley, an unknown writer at the time, set that early standard. Haley’s first interview was in 1962 with jazz musician Miles Davis, and he would go on to talk with other entertainers, politicians, and social leaders for the magazine, including Jim Brown, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party in the 1960s.

Playboy had nothing on the movie poster for “You Only Live Twice.” (Robert McGinnis/United Artist)

3. “The Hildebrand Rarity,” Ian Fleming (1960)

If the Playboy Bunny icon hadn’t already been chosen (and since Don Draper or Jon Hamm hadn’t been conceived), publisher Hugh Hefner should’ve considered James Bond to fill the role of company mascot. He was the kind of man Playboy readers wanted to be. That’s why it makes sense that 007 would make his debut in the magazine’s pages with this short story (which would be collected in For Your Eyes Only that same year).

4. “The Day Bobby Blew It,” Brad Darrach (1973)

Considered one of the best pieces of sportswriting of all time, Darrach’s look at 1972’s championship chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky was an incisive look at this Cold War contest through the strange lens of a slowly unraveling Fischer.

5. “The Great Shark Hunt,” Hunter S. Thompson (1974)

While his gonzo journalism is mostly associated with Rolling Stone, Hunter S. Thompson would pop up in the pages of any publication willing to foot the bill for his copy and on-the-job expenses. “The Great Shark Hunt” is the Playboy article about a fishing competition in Mexico that also shares the name with the 1979 collection of the journalist’s work from the mid-’50s on.

6. Jimmy Carter Interview (1976)

Conducted while the then-Georgia governor was running for president, this interview marks the first time a candidate would speak openly about faith and sexuality. And once it was labeled the “Lust in My Heart” interview after it was published, this interview marked the last time a candidate would be that frank about any topic, including the weather and possibly the color of the sky.

The answer that hijacked news headlines and almost sank Carter’s campaign because it was scandalous (SPOILER ALERT: He won!) looks practically quaint nowadays:

“Christ said, ‘I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.’ I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

7. “Yossarian Survives,” Joseph Heller (1987)

This “lost chapter” of Catch-22, Heller’s scathing war satire, first saw the light of day in the pages of Playboy, more than 25 years after the novel it was originally written for was published. It eventually joined other short works by Heller in the 2003 posthumous collection Catch As Catch Can: The Collected Stories and Other Writings.

8. “The Bog Man,” Margaret Atwood (1991)

Canada’s grande dame of science-fiction speculative fiction, known for literary works set 10 minutes in the future like A Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, published some of her short stories in Playboy throughout the’90s and the early 21st century. “The Bog Man,” her first work in the magazine, uses the discovery of a 2,000-year-old sacrificial corpse as the backdrop to exploring an extramarital affair.

Vladimir Nabokov (Giuseppe Pino/Mondadori Publishers/Creative CommonsWikimedia)

9. The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov (2009)

An excerpt of this never-completed novel by the late Lolita writer was published by Playboy in the United States. It was the second time the magazine had run excerpts from a Nabokov novel.

In 1969, part of Ada or Ardor ran in the publication. In fact, as a way to land the excerpt rights to Laura in 2009, then-editor Amy Grace Loyd sent the book’s agent orchids, a reference to the ’69 novel and a mic-drop move showing she knew her literary history.