Pumping Iron

Before the documentary that made Arnold Schwarzenegger famous, Pumping Iron was a book: Charles Gaines’s text and George Butler’s photographs capturing 1970s bodybuilding as a subculture and an art form. It brought the sport out of the gyms and into mainstream American life. Schwarzenegger chose the reissue as his book of the month, noting many people don’t realise it was a great book before it was a movie, and that he wrote the foreword.