“Outrageous” was one of many terms applied to Frank Zappa during his musical career. One album, he’d be in a smutty satirical mode, the next was full of serious compositions. When he and the latest incarnation of the Mothers of Invention arrived in May 1973, Zappa was on the cusp of what proved to be [...]

Given the whiff of union-bashing in the air as municipal labour strife looms, it’s hard to imagine a headline such as the one employed here by clothier Philip Jamieson being created by a similar business these days. While today’s vintage ad appeared in a publication dedicated to covering the union movement, it does suggest that [...]

When management at Telemedia decided to switch CJCL’s phone-in sports commentary show to a magazine format in the fall of 1989, they looked to Canada’s public broadcaster for inspiration. Prime Time Sports was to be the athletic equivalent of As it Happens, a promise that Star sports media columnist Ken McKee felt placed “a large [...]

There once was a time when newspaper book editors could relax on a tower of bestsellers, comforted by the knowledge that their section received full blessing from the bean counters. As today’s ad notes, the revamped Telegram books page featured editor George Anthony’s column on general notes from the publishing world, a selection of current [...]

In the beginning, there was a box of back issues of Sports Illustrated in my Mom’s shed. As a kid, I loved flipping through SI when it arrived in the mail. The articles didn’t always grab my attention, but the ads did. When the time came to clear out two decades’ worth of magazines, I [...]

9:30 a.m., January 2, 1969: a group of police-escorted limos filled with three generations of the Eaton family arrived at their Queen Street department store. As two of President John David Eaton’s granddaughters opened the store with a gold-plated key, fireworks exploded from the roof. Blasts were fired every four seconds until 100 went off. [...]

SPOTTED BY: Eli Singer, followed up and photographed by Kyle Bachan WHERE: College and Bathurst streets WHEN: Saturday, 4:30 p.m.; photographed Sunday at 7:30 a.m. WHAT: On Saturday afternoon, some unknown/heroic Torontonian(s), clearly fed up with Astral Media’s enormous info(less) pillars that have been sprouting up around the city, decided to take a stand. Two [...]

Joining the ranks of rejected garbage bins with huge ad panels, transit shelters that don’t shelter, and push-pedal garbage bins that have been falling apart at an alarming rate, lately Torontonians have been confronted with a new form of failure in our street furniture: giant “InfoToGo” pillars. Today though, there were a couple of very [...]

While we doubt that Toronto’s cultural elite emptied bottles of PBR at their private clubs a century ago, we sense the local importer had a good feel for who this brew could be marketed to: germaphobes and health purists. The claims of cleanliness also make us wonder how lax local brewers were toward sanitizing their [...]

Despite dressing him up in glistening brass buttons and a dapper waxed moustache, we doubt that these stylish touches increased the popularity of the friendly neighbourhood debt collector. We also doubt that pinning a “Collector of Bad Debts” badge persuaded delinquent accounts to settle up, unless the sight of such adornments struck shame in the [...]

Things opened on Christmas Day: presents under a tree, cards from dear friends, bottles of wine at the dinner table, old family wounds, and movie theatres. Yes, movie theatres. Catching a film on December 25 is a tradition for lonely souls eager to escape painful reminders of the holidays, for families and friends to flee [...]

Though the visuals in today’s ad refer to Neil Young’s album Comes a Time, the set list during his performance at Maple Leaf Gardens on October 1, 1978, barely touched on that record—only three of the 20 songs that night appeared on the country-flavoured collection. Instead, as the Star’s Peter Goddard put it, Young’s performance [...]