Large crowd shows up at Book Warehouse for launch of The Georgia Straight: A 50th Anniversary Celebration

by Charlie Smith on September 27th, 2017 at 9:06 PM

1 of 3 2 of 3

A new coffee-table book, The Georgia Straight: A 50th Anniversary Celebration, features more than 100 covers of the newspaper dating back to its origins in 1967.

And this evening at a book launch at the Book Warehouse on Main Street, one of the coauthors, Doug Sarti, was asked which was his favourite image.

He hemmed and hawed for a moment before responding that this was a difficult question.

"There are so many great ones," Sarti said, before acknowledging that he really liked the Rand Holmes cover illustrations in the 1970s.

Holmes drew an image of Mick Jagger on a giant inflatable pink penis in 1975, which is one of the covers included in the book.

This was one of the more famous Straight covers.

The other coauthor, Straight publisher Dan McLeod, was also in attendance to greet the large number of well wishers in the store.

Among them was artist Mark Pilon, who drew some of the covers that appear in the book. Former Straight editor Charles Campbell was also at the event, as was former premier Mike Harcourt, who contributed an essay to The Georgia Straight: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

It was published by Rocky Mountain Books and features a cover drawing by Bob Masse, a pioneer in psychedelic illustration.

Bob Masse drew the illustration that graces the book's cover.

Charlie Smith

In addition to Harcourt's contribution, the book includes an introduction by humanitarian Bob Geldof, who was the Straight's music editor in the 1970s. There are also essays by punk artist Bif Naked and environmental activist Paul Watson, who wrote for the Straight for many years.

“In fact, I would venture to say that the Georgia Straight was the anvil upon which was forged the modern environmental movement,” Watson writes. “The paper didn’t just report the news; it created the news. It didn’t just report on art and culture; it created and inspired art and moulded culture.”

This morning, Sarti appeared on Citytv's Breakfast Television show to talk about the book. You can hear what he had to say in the tweet below: